JIUQUAN: China will send an astronaut to its space station on Sunday for a year, a record length for the country, enabling the study of long-term human physiology in space as Beijing works towards its ambition of a manned lunar landing by 2030.
The Shenzhou-23 craft is scheduled to launch at 23:08 (1508 GMT) using the Long March-2F Y23 launch vehicle from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, with three Chinese astronauts on board.
Payload specialist Li Jiaying, a former Hong Kong police inspector, will be the first astronaut from the city to join a Chinese space mission. The other crew members are Commander Zhu Yangzhu and Pilot Zhang Yuanzhi, both from the People’s Liberation Army’s Astronaut Division.
China, US aim for the moon
One of the three is to stay on the Tiangong space station for a year, one of the longest space missions ever, but short of the 14-1/2 month record set by a Russian cosmonaut in 1995.
That astronaut will be decided later, depending on the mission’s progress, the China Manned Space Agency said Saturday.
China has sent astronauts to its space station nearly a dozen times, but this launch comes amid an accelerating race to the moon with the United States, which has warned of what it claims are Beijing’s plans to colonize and mine lunar territory and resources.
Beijing has strongly denied these claims.
Nasa is looking to achieve a manned lunar landing by 2028, two years ahead of China. The US aims to establish a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
In April, four Nasa astronauts made a historic trip around the moon as part of the Artemis II mission, flying further from Earth than anyone before in the world’s first manned lunar mission in half a century.
On Friday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX conducted a largely successful unmanned test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket, which is designed to enable more frequent Starlink satellite launches and send future Nasa missions to the moon.
China, with less than four years to its 2030 deadline, faces a major task in developing brand new hardware and software specific to its lunar mission, proving it is mission ready. That will ensure its astronauts, accustomed to Tiangong’s relative safety in low Earth orbit, can safely make the riskier transition to the lunar surface.
China’s Shenzhou missions have sent trios of astronauts to the station for six-month stays since 2021. The Chinese space agency is training two Pakistani astronauts, one of whom could join an expected mission to Tiangong this year on a short-term basis.
Goal of permanent lunar base by 2035
The previous mission, Shenzhou-22, was launched ahead of schedule in November to return three Chinese astronauts to Earth after their Shenzhou-20 craft was damaged by space debris in orbit.
China has only sent robots to the moon, but its successive Shenzhou missions highlight the country’s rapidly improving space capabilities. In June 2024, China became the first country to recover lunar samples from the far side of the moon using robots.
A successful manned landing before 2030 would boost China’s plans to establish a permanent base on the moon by 2035 with Russia.
The Chinese lunar program’s chief scientist, Wu Weiren, has said that Beijing’s public timeline is deliberately conservative.
Over the past year, Beijing has conducted safety tests of hardware developed for the 2030 mission, including heavy-lift Long March-10 rockets, the Mengzhou spacecraft and the Lanyue lunar lander.
The Shenzhou-23 flight will perform the first autonomous rapid rendezvous and docking procedure with the core module in Tiangong in preparation for the 2030 mission, which depends on an automated lunar orbit between the Mengzhou capsule and the Lanyue lander.
Scientists will also study the physiological effects of radiation exposure, bone density and psychological stress in space for the extended duration of the Shenzhou-23 mission.
Beijing is conducting the world’s first human “artificial embryo” experiment in space, after sending samples of human stem cells to the Shenzhou-22 crew at Tiangong this month, state media reported. The purpose of the experiment is to study the long-term stay, survival and reproduction of humans in space.
