Beijing
Reuters
—
China’s Shenzhou-21 space rocket and its crew together with the youngest member of its astronaut corps blasted off on Friday atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, Chinese state media reported.
It was the seventh mission to the completely inhabited Chinese space station because it was accomplished in 2022.
Missions on China’s Shenzhou-21 spacecraft contain trios of astronauts on six-month stays in space, with veteran astronauts more and more changed by youthful faces. First-timers Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu Fei, 32 – China’s youngest astronaut to be despatched to space – have been picked to take part in this system in 2020.
Commander Zhang Lu, 48, flew on the 2022 Shenzhou-15 mission.
The Shenzhou-21 astronauts will take over from the Shenzhou-20 crew who had lived and labored on board Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace,” for greater than six months. The Shenzhou-20 astronauts will return to Earth within the coming days.
The Shenzhou-21 crew have been additionally joined by four black mice, the primary small mammals to be taken to the Chinese space station. The mice will probably be utilized in experiments on replica in low Earth orbit.
Biannual launches have turn into the norm for the Shenzhou program, which has up to now 12 months reached new milestones with the deployment of Chinese astronauts born within the Nineteen Nineties, a world-record spacewalk, and plans to practice and ship the primary overseas astronaut, from Pakistan, to Tiangong subsequent 12 months.
The speedy advances have raised alarm bells in Washington, which is now racing to put a U.S. astronaut on the moon once more earlier than China does.
Both international locations are additionally competing in nascent institution-building efforts, with the US-led Artemis Accords on lunar exploration matched up in opposition to the Chinese and Russian-led International Lunar Research Station.