Beijing:
Three Chinese astronauts docked at the country’s space station on Sunday, the state broadcaster said, marking another milestone in Beijing’s aspiration to become a major space force.
The trio fired off a Long March-2F missile at 0244 GMT from the Jiuquan launch site in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China, CCTV broadcaster said.
The team is tasked with “completing in-orbit assembly and construction of the space station,” as well as “commissioning equipment” and conducting science experiments, the state-run CGTN said Saturday.
The spacecraft docked at Tiangong station after about “seven hours of flying,” CCTV reported.
Tiangong, meaning ‘heavenly palace’, is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year.
China’s heavily promoted space program has already had the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.
The crew of the Shenzhou-14 is led by Air Force pilot Chen Dong, 43, the three-man crew’s biggest challenge will be connecting the station’s two lab modules to the main body.
Dong, along with fellow pilots Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe, will become the second crew to spend six months aboard the Tiangong after the latter returned to Earth in April after 183 days on the space station.
Tiangong’s core module entered orbit earlier last year and is expected to operate for at least a decade.
The completed station will be similar to the Soviet Mir station that orbited the Earth from the 1980s to 2001.
Space ambitions
The world’s second-largest economy has poured billions into its military-run space program, hoping to have a permanently manned space station by 2022 and eventually send humans to the moon.
The country has made great strides in catching up with the United States and Russia, whose astronauts and cosmonauts have decades of experience in space exploration.
But under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the country’s plans for its highly promoted “space dream” have accelerated.
In addition to a space station, Beijing also plans to build a base on the moon, and the country’s National Space Administration said it aims to launch a manned moon mission by 2029.
China has been barred from the International Space Station since 2011, when the United States banned NASA from contacting the country.
While China has no plans to use its space station for global cooperation on the scale of the ISS, Beijing has said it is open to foreign cooperation.
The ISS will be retired after 2024, although NASA has said it can remain functional until 2030.
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)