China will launch the first crew of its new permanent space station into orbit on Thursday. An official with the China Manned Space Agency announced Wednesday that veteran astronauts Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming and rookie Tang Hongbo will blast off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China aboard the Shenzhou-12. At age 56, Nie Haisheng will become China’s oldest astronaut to fly to space.
The mission will be China’s longest crewed space mission to date and the first in nearly five years, as Beijing pushes forward with its ambitious programme to establish itself as a space power. The astronauts will spend three months onboard the station, which has separate living modules for each of them, as well as a shared bathroom, dining area, and a communication centre to send emails and allow two-way video calls with ground control. The three members of the first crew to be sent to China’s space station say they’re eager to get to work making their home for the next three months habitable, setting up testing and experiments and preparing for a series of spacewalks. The astronauts will be traveling in the Shenzhou-12 spaceship launched by a Long March-2F Y12 rocket set to blast off at 9:22 a.m. (0122 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch center in northwestern China.
Thursday’s launch begins the first crewed space mission in five years for an increasingly ambitious space program. China has sent 11 astronauts into space since becoming the third country to so so on its own in 2003, and has sent orbiters and rovers to the moon and Mars.
