China launched aspacecraft on Thursday, June 17, 2021, carrying three astronauts to part of a space station still under construction for the longest stay in low Earth orbit by any Chinese national.
A Long March 2F rocket transporting the Shenzhou-12, or Divine Vessel, bound for the space station module Tianhe blasted off at 9:22 a.m. Beijing time (0122 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern Gansu province.
The launch time saw bright blue skies with near perfect visibility at the launch center on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
Among the astronauts in China’s space mission, Nie Haisheng has flown to space twice before — on the Shenzou-6 mission in 2005 and then again on the Shenzhou-10 mission in 2013. The former air force pilot is now the oldest Chinese astronaut to go to space, reported news agency Reuters. Liu Boming flew on the Shenzhou-7 space mission in 2008, while this is the first spaceflight for the other astronaut, Tang Hongbo.
The three-month stay for Nie, Liu, and Tang will be the longest for any Chinese astronauts, and one focus will be seeing how the men handle their relatively long time in orbit. “The (mission) is longer this time, and not only do we have to set up the core module – this ‘home’ in space – we’ve to carry out a series of pivotal technical tests,” Nie told reporters in Jiuquan. Although the Tianhe module has already received a robotic visitor last month — the Tianzhou-2 cargo craft — this will be the first time that humans set foot aboard it.
Shenzhou-12, meaning “Divine Vessel”, is the third of 11 missions needed to build China’s space station. The most recent of China’s space missions was Shenzhou-11, in October 2016, which carried three astronauts for a one-month stay at a prototype precursor for the new Chinese space station.
Chinese astronauts have had a comparatively low international profile. US legislation bars NASA from any cooperation with China, and Chinese astronauts have not been to the more than two-decade-old International Space Station (ISS), which has been visited by more than 240 men and women of various nationalities. The ISS may be decommissioned in 2024 if the project does not receive new funding, and China could end up being the operator of the only space station in Earth’s orbit.
China’s space program has expanded rapidly in the past decade — in the last seven months alone, the country’s scientists have already successfully landed exploratory rovers on the moon in December and on Mars in May.
In April, they successfully launched the first module of the space station. The station will need to be assembled from several modules launching at different times. If successfully completed, the station is expected to operate for 10 years.
