China sends a crewed expedition to the Tiangong space station to finish it

• China’s space program launched its first astronaut into orbit in 2003,
• Three astronauts are dispatched on a six-month mission to complete work on the country’s permanent orbiting space station.
• They took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in northwest China.

The China Manned Space Agency said on Sunday that three astronauts are dispatched on a six-month mission to complete work on the country’s permanent orbiting space station.

The Shenzhou-14 crew will stay aboard the Tiangong station for six months, overseeing the integration of two laboratory modules into the main Tianhe living room, which was launched in April 2021.

A Long March-2F rocket carrying the spacecraft Shenzhou-14, or “Divine Vessel,” and its three astronauts took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in northwest China at 10:44 a.m. (02:44 GMT), according to a live broadcast by state television.

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Commander Chen Dong, 43, is leading the trip with fellow astronauts Liu Yang, 43, and Cai Xuzhe, 46. They will spend roughly 180 days on the space station, living and working there before returning to Earth in December.

When finished by the end of the year, the space station would mark a key milestone in China’s three-decade-long crewed space program, which was first approved in 1992.

The completion of the construction, which is nearly a fifth of the mass of the International Space Station (ISS), is a source of pride for ordinary Chinese people and marks the end of President Xi Jinping’s ten years as the ruling Communist Party’s leader.

After the former Soviet Union and the United States, China’s space program launched its first astronaut into orbit in 2003, making it only the third country to achieve so on its own.

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Last year, it landed robot rovers on the moon and sent one to Mars. China has also returned lunar samples, and officials have considered the possibility of a crewed lunar mission.

The People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the Communist Party, is in charge of China’s space program, forcing the US to remove it from the ISS.

The crew of the forthcoming Shenzhou-15 will join Chen, Liu, and Cai for three to five days at the end of their mission, marking the first time the station has had six people on board.

The space station is expected to last at least ten years.

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