The team of two men and one woman will replace astronauts who have been living on the Tiangong space station for the past six months, conducting various experiments and maintaining the facility.
A Chinese spacecraft with a crew of three docked with the orbiting space station on Oct. 29, the Washington Post reported.
The team of two men and one woman will replace astronauts who have been living on the Tiangong space station for the past six months, conducting various experiments and maintaining the facility.
They are expected to stay until April or May next year. The mission's new commander, Cai Xuzhe, traveled to space with the Shenzhou-14 mission in 2022, while the other two, Song Lindong and Wang Haojie, are flying for the first time. Song and Wang were born in the 1990s and are graduates of the third wave to recruit Chinese astronauts, having gone through a rigorous testing and training process that took years.
Early on the morning of October 30, China declared the launch and the spacewalk a "complete success."
The Shenzhou-19 spacecraft carrying the trio lifted off from the Zhuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China on a Long March-2F rocket, which is the mainstay of China's manned space missions.
"The condition of the crew is good, and the launch was successful," China's state-run Central Television reported.
China built its own space station after being shut out of the International Space Station, mainly because of U.S. concerns about the People's Liberation Army's overall control of the space program. China's lunar program is part of a growing rivalry with the United States and other countries, including Japan and India.
In addition to putting a space station into orbit, the Chinese space agency has landed an explorer on Mars. It aims to send a man to the moon before 2030, making China the second country after the US to achieve such a feat. Beijing also plans to build a research station on the moon and has already beamed rock and soil samples from the moon - the first time in decades - and placed a rover on the moon's little-explored far side - a global first.
The US is still leading the way in space exploration and plans to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, although earlier this year NASA pushed back the target date to 2026.
The new Chinese crew will carry out spacewalks and install new equipment to protect the station from space debris, some of which was created by China. | BGNES
