(Jiuquan) China will send three new astronauts on Wednesday, including a woman, to its Tiangong space station, a mission intended to strengthen its experience in orbit and prepare for its conquest of the Moon by 2030.
Posted at 9:44 p.m.
The Asian giant’s major objective in the short term is to send a crew to the lunar star by this date and to complete the construction of an international scientific research base there around 2035.
The Shenzhou-19 mission craft is scheduled to launch at 4:27 a.m. local time (4:27 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday) from Jiuquan Launch Center in northwest China on Wednesday. the space agency responsible for human flights (CMSA) said Tuesday during a press conference on the scene.
The crew will be led by Cai Xuzhe, 48, who participated in Shenzhou-14.
He will be accompanied by astronauts Song Lingdong, an air force pilot, and fellow engineer Wang Haoze, who will be the third Chinese woman to go into space. They were both born in the 1990s and will be on their first mission to space.
PHOTO FLORENCE LO, REUTERS
Les atronautes Cai Xuzhe, Song Lingdong et Wang Haoze
The trio will be welcomed in the Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) station by the three astronauts from the previous mission, Shenzhou-18, in orbit since April and who will return to Earth in a few days.
The new crew, that of Shenzhou-19, must remain in the orbiting laboratory until the end of April or the beginning of May, the CMSA said on Tuesday.
Tiangong is similar in size to the former Russian-Soviet station Mir, but much smaller than the International Space Station (ISS). It is also known as CSS (for “Chinese Space Station” in English).
China has considerably developed its space programs over the past thirty years in order to reach the level of the United States, Russia or Europe.
The Asian giant had landed a spacecraft in 2019 (the probe Chang’e-4) on the far side of the Moon, a world first. In 2021, he landed a small robot on Mars.
China hopes to use Tiangong for about a decade.
