The three astronauts aboard a rocket departed shortly after 1:30 a.m. in Lisbon from the Jiuquan Launch Center, in the Gobi Desert, in the country’s northwest, according to the China Space Agency in charge of manned spaceflight (CMSA).
The flight is part of the strategy to send a Chinese astronaut to the moon by 2030, one of the main goals of a space program in which the country has already invested billions of euros.
Veteran mission commander Jing Haiping (56 years old) is on his fourth space flight and is accompanied by engineer Zhou Yangzhu, Professor Joy Haichao and China’s first civilian in space, aged 36.
Haichao, who specializes in space science and engineering, will conduct experiments at the station and will not come from the armed forces, as has always happened until now.
Representatives of China’s space program confirmed Monday that the change in requirements is due to “the new phase that the Tiangong space station has entered, during which it will house a large number of scientific experiments.”
The station will host research in growing plants, breeding fish, testing the behavior of fluids in zero gravity, studying animal and plant cells, as well as installing the most accurate atomic clock ever.
The three astronauts are the first to arrive in Tiangong, where they will spend the next five months, after the completion of the construction of the Chinese space station, at the end of 2022.
Work is already done
CMSA Deputy Director Lin Shiqiang said Monday that the country “expects and welcomes” the participation of foreign astronauts in Chinese missions.
China already has cooperation projects with the European Space Agency and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, which may increase, given that Tiangong may soon become the only operational space station.
In 2019, the country landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, becoming the first country in the world to do so. In 2020, it returned lunar samples and completed the Beidou satellite navigation system.
In 2021, China will land a small robot on Mars, and the next step is to ensure the launch of two manned space missions annually, according to CMSA.
Next will be Shenzhou-17, whose launch is scheduled for October.
The country still wants to launch the Tianwen-3 space mission in 2030, to collect Martian soil samples and return them to Earth, Portuguese scientist André Antunes, who is in charge of the astrobiology unit at the Reference Laboratory for Lunar and Planetary Sciences. from the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST).
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