Three astronauts safely return to Earth Wednesday after 15-day
mission.   BEIJING – After China's longest ever manned space
mission, three astronauts safely returned to Earth Wednesday as
China celebrated another successful step forward in the slow but
steady space program that President Xi Jinping has linked to his
"dream" of national revival.  The 15-day mission, whose
highlights included manual docking with an orbiting space
station and a science lecture to 60 million students, concluded
when the descent module of the Shenzhou 10 spacecraft parachuted
down to a sparsely populated area of Inner Mongolia.  The
Shenzhou 10, whose name means "Sacred Vessel," linked up with
the Tiangong 1 ("Heavenly Palace") space station in a "perfect"
mission, Wang Zhaoyao, director of China's manned space program,
told a news conference in Beijing. Tiangong 1 has now completed
its mission as an experimental prototype and will not be
revisited. By 2020, Beijing plans to launch a permanently manned
space station.  "As we celeb