China's space station welcomes new crew as Beijing advances President Xi's 'space dream'

Three Chinese astronauts, including the country's only female spaceflight engineer, entered the Tiangong space station Wednesday morning after an early morning orbit.

The Shenzhou-19 mission took off with its trio of space explorers from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, the official Xinhua news agency and state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Among the crew is Wang Haoze, 34, a spaceflight engineer, according to the China Human Space Mission Agency (CMSA). She is the third Chinese woman to participate in a crewed mission.

The crew met with astronauts from the previous Shenzhou-18 mission, “starting a new round of crew transfers in orbit,” Xinhua said.

Tiangong's new team will conduct experiments toward the space program's goal of placing astronauts on the Moon by 2030 and, ultimately, building a lunar base.

The space agency considered the launch a “complete success,” Xinhua said, noting that the spacecraft separated from the rocket it was on and entered its designated orbit about 10 minutes after liftoff.

Xinhua later said the spacecraft had “performed a rapid, automated rendezvous and docking with the forward port of the space station's core module, Tianhe.”

The team will return to Earth in late April or early May next year, CMSA Deputy Director Lin Xiqiang said at a press event ahead of the launch. The current crew is expected to return to Earth on November 4. They have been aboard the space station for six months.

China's ambitious space goals

China has stepped up plans to realize its “space dream” under President Xi Jinping.

He built a space station after being kept off the International Space Station, largely because of U.S. concerns about the Chinese Communist Party's military wing's overall control of the space program, the Associated Press points out. , adding that Beijing's lunar program is part of a growing project. rivalry with the United States and others, notably Japan and India.

China was the third country to put humans into orbit and has landed robotic robots on Mars and the Moon.

Made up of teams of three astronauts who alternate every six months, the Tiangong space station is the jewel of the program.

Beijing says it is on track to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030, where it intends to build a base on the lunar surface.

So far, only the United States has landed a crewed spacecraft on the Moon.

One experiment the Shenzhou-19 crew is expected to carry out during their time aboard Tiangong involves “bricks” made from components mimicking lunar soil, CCTV reported.

These items – which will be delivered to Tiangong by the Tianzhou-8 cargo ship in November – will be tested to see how they behave under extreme conditions of radiation, gravity, temperature and other conditions.

Due to the high cost of transporting materials into space, Chinese scientists hope to use lunar soil for the construction of the future base, CCTV reported.

The Shenzhou-19 mission aims above all to “accumulate additional experience,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Agence France-Presse.

Although this crew's six-month stay aboard Tiangong did not witness any major breakthroughs or feats, it was still “very valuable to do,” McDowell said.

Over the past few decades, China has poured billions of dollars into developing an advanced space program comparable to that of the United States and Europe.

In 2019, China landed a probe on the far side of the Moon, making it the first spacecraft to do so. In 2021, he landed a small robot on Mars.

Tiangong, whose core module was launched in 2021, is expected to be used for about 10 years.