China sending astronaut on year-long space mission
China will send an astronaut to the space station for a year, allowing long-term study of human physiology in space as it moves towards Beijing’s goal of a manned Moon landing by 2030.
The Shenzhou-23 craft, with three Chinese astronauts on board, is scheduled to launch at 23:08 (01:08 Monday AEST) using the Long March-2F Y23 carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.
Payload expert Li Jiaying, a former Hong Kong police inspector, will be the first astronaut from the city to join China’s space mission. Other crew members include commander Zhu Yangzhu and pilot Zhang Yuanzhi, both from the People’s Liberation Army’s astronaut division.
One of the three is a one-year stay on the Tiangong space station; It is one of the longest space missions ever, but short of the record of 14 and a half months set by a Russian cosmonaut in 1995.
The China Manned Space Agency said on Saturday that astronaut placement will be decided later depending on the progress of the mission.
China has sent astronauts to the space station nearly a dozen times, but this launch comes amid an escalating race to the moon with the United States, which Beijing claims has plans to colonize and mine lunar lands and resources.
Beijing has vehemently denied these allegations.
NASA aims to conduct a manned moon landing in 2028, two years earlier than China.
The United States aims to establish a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone for eventual human exploration of Mars.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Friday conducted a largely successful, uncrewed test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket, designed to enable more frequent launches of Starlink satellites and send future NASA missions to the moon.
With less than four years until the 2030 deadline, China faces the difficult task of developing entirely new hardware and software specific to the lunar mission and proving its readiness for the mission.
China’s missions to Shenzhou have been sending a trio of astronauts to the station for six-month stays since 2021.
A successful crewed landing before 2030 would strengthen China’s plans to establish a permanent base on the moon together with Russia by 2035.
Beijing is carrying out the world’s first human “artificial embryo” experiment in space by sending human stem cell samples to the Shenzhou-22 crew in Tiangong this month, state media reported.
The experiment aims to study long-term residence, survival and reproduction of humans in space.
