More efficient than the ISS? A tour of China's Tiangong space station

China’s establishment of a permanently crewed space station and the successful docking of the first three-person crew last week propels it into the league of space superpowers. Unlike the International Space Station (ISS), China’s Tiangong space station was designed and constructed by a single national space agency.

Given multi-fold advances in technology, the Tiangong is likely to be more efficient than the ISS in many respects. This was evident in the crew transfer. 

The flight to the station, followed by the transfer of the crew, took a total of about six hours — on average, the same process takes nearly