China sends its youngest astronaut to ‘Heavenly Palace’ space station
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s Shenzhou-21 space rocket and its crew, including the youngest member of the astronaut corps, launched atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China on Friday, Chinese state media reported.
This was the seventh mission to the permanently inhabited Chinese space station since its completion in 2022.
Missions aboard China’s Shenzhou-21 spacecraft consist of three astronauts who will spend six months in space, with experienced astronauts increasingly being replaced by younger faces. 39-year-old Zhang Hongzhang, who will be sent into space for the first time, and 32-year-old Wu Fei (China’s youngest astronaut to be sent into space) were selected to participate in the program in 2020.
Commander Zhang Lu, 48, flew the 2022 Shenzhou-15 mission.
THE FIRST SMALL MAMMALS ON THE SPACE STATION
The Shenzhou-21 astronauts will take over from the Shenzhou-20 crew, who have been living and working in the Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace,” for more than six months. Shenzhou-20 astronauts will return to Earth in the coming days.
The Shenzhou-21 crew was also joined by four black mice, the first small mammals to be taken to the Chinese space station. The mice will be used in breeding experiments in low Earth orbit.
Biennial launches have become the norm for the Shenzhou program, which last year reached new milestones with the deployment of Chinese astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk and plans to train the first foreign astronaut from Pakistan and send them to Tiangong next year.
The rapid advances have set off alarm bells in Washington, where a US astronaut is racing to land on the moon again before China.
Both countries are also competing in nascent institution-building efforts with the U.S.-led Artemis Accords for lunar exploration paired with the China- and Russia-led International Lunar Research Station.
(Reporting by Ryan Woo and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by David Holmes)
