China sends astronaut on year-long space mission
China sent three astronauts to the space station; One of them will stay for a year, a record length for the country, and will enable long-term study of human physiology in space as Beijing works towards its goal of a manned moon landing by 2030.
The Shenzhou-23 craft was launched at 23:08 local time (0108 AEST) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, using the Long March-2F Y23 carrier rocket, with three Chinese astronauts on board.
Payload expert Li Jiaying, a former Hong Kong police inspector, is 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 aboard the Tiangong space station, one of the longest space missions ever, but short of the record of 14.5 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.
In April, four NASA astronauts made a historic journey around the moon as part of the Artemis II mission, flying farther from Earth than anyone before in the world’s first manned lunar mission in half a century.
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.
This will enable Tiangong’s astronauts, accustomed to the relative safety of low-Earth orbit, to safely make the riskier transition to the lunar surface.
China’s missions to Shenzhou have been sending a trio of astronauts to the station for six-month stays since 2021.
Chinese space agency trains two Pakistani astronauts; One of them will participate in a short-term mission to Tiangong this year.
The previous mission, Shenzhou-22, was launched ahead of schedule in November to return three Chinese astronauts to Earth after their Shenzhou-20 ship was damaged by space debris in orbit.
China has only sent robots to the moon, but successive Shenzhou missions underscore the country’s rapidly developing space capabilities.
In June 2024, China became the first country to collect lunar samples from the far side of the moon using robots.
A successful crewed landing before 2030 would strengthen China’s plans to establish a permanent base on the moon together with Russia by 2035.
Wu Weiren, chief scientist of the Chinese lunar program, said Beijing’s public timeline was deliberately conservative.
Scientists will also study the physiological effects of radiation exposure, bone density loss, and psychological stress in space during the extended duration of the Shenzhou-23 mission.
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.
