On Friday, China launched a rocket carrying a vehicle carrying three astronauts, including a woman, into the nucleus of a future space station where they will live and work for six months, in the longest orbit for Chinese astronauts to date.
A Long March-2F rocket carried the Shenzhou-13 spacecraft from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province at 12:23 a.m. Beijing time (1623 GMT Friday).
The Chinese space agency for manned flights said the spacecraft successfully docked with the space station at 6.56 am (2156 GMT), and the astronauts entered the basic unit of the space station at 10.03 am.
China began construction of what will be its first permanent space station in April with the launch of the first and largest of the three station units called Tianhe, meaning “harmony of the heavens”, a cylinder 16.6 meters long and 4.2 meters in diameter.
The current mission will be the second of four manned missions scheduled to the station to complete its construction by the end of next year. On the first manned mission, which ended in September, three other astronauts stayed on the Tianhe unit for 90 days.
In the latest mission, the Chinese astronauts will conduct necessary tests of key technologies and robotics on the Tianhe module to assemble the space station. The life support systems on board the station will also be verified and many scientific experiments conducted.
China has spent the past decade developing its own technologies. US law prohibits China from working with the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and thus on the International Space Station.
With the International Space Station ready to retire in a few years, it will become the only Chinese space station in Earth orbit.
China became the third country to put a man into space with its own rocket in October 2003, after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
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