JIUQUAN: China will send an astronaut to its space station for a year on Sunday, a record duration for the country, enabling the study of long-term human physiology in space as Beijing works to realize its ambition of a crewed moon landing by 2030.
The Shenzhou-23 spacecraft is scheduled to launch at 11:08 p.m. (15:08 GMT) using the Long March-2F Y23 carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, with three Chinese astronauts on board.
Li Jiaying, a payload specialist and former Hong Kong police inspector, will be the first astronaut from the city to take part in a Chinese space mission. The other crew members are Commander Zhu Yangzhu and Pilot Zhang Yuanzhi, both from the astronaut division of the People’s Liberation Army.
China and the United States aim for the Moon
One of the three involves staying on the Tiangong space station for a year, one of the longest space missions ever, but short of the record of 14 and a half months set by a Russian cosmonaut in 1995.
The choice of this astronaut will be decided later, depending on the progress of the mission, the Chinese Manned Space Mission Agency announced on 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 exploit lunar territory and resources.
Beijing has strongly rejected these claims.
NASA is seeking to carry out a crewed moon landing in 2028, two years before China. The United States aims to establish a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to possible human exploration of Mars.
In April, four NASA astronauts made a historic trip around the Moon on the Artemis II mission, flying farther from Earth than ever before in the world’s first crewed lunar mission in half a century.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Friday successfully conducted an uncrewed test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket, designed to enable more frequent launches of Starlink satellites and to send future NASA missions to the Moon.
China, less than four years from the 2030 deadline, faces a daunting challenge in developing entirely new hardware and software specific to its lunar mission, proving it is mission ready. This will ensure that its astronauts, accustomed to the relative safety of Tiangong in low Earth orbit, can safely make the riskier transition to the Moon’s surface.
China’s Shenzhou missions have been sending trios of astronauts to the station for six-month stays since 2021. China’s space agency is training two Pakistani astronauts, one of whom could join a planned mission to Tiangong this year on a short-term basis.
Objective of a permanent lunar base by 2035
The previous mission, Shenzhou-22, launched ahead of schedule in November to return three Chinese astronauts to Earth after their Shenzhou-20 spacecraft was damaged by space debris in orbit.
China has only sent robots to the Moon, but its successive missions to Shenzhou highlight the rapid improvement of its space capabilities. In June 2024, China became the first country to retrieve lunar samples from the far side of the Moon, using robots.
A successful crewed landing before 2030 would bolster China’s plans to establish a permanent base on the Moon by 2035 with Russia.
The chief scientist of China’s lunar program, Wu Weiren, said Beijing’s public schedule was intentionally conservative.
Over the past year, Beijing has conducted safety tests on hardware developed for the 2030 mission, including the Long March-10 heavy-lift 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 Tiangong core module in preparation for the 2030 mission, which relies on an automated rendezvous in lunar orbit between the Mengzhou capsule and the Lanyue lander.
Scientists will also study the physiological effects of radiation exposure, bone density loss and psychological stress in space during the extended duration of the Shenzhou-23 mission.
Beijing is currently conducting the world’s first “artificial embryo” experiment in space, having sent human stem cell samples to the Shenzhou-22 crew aboard the Tiangong this month, state media reported. The experiment aims to study the long-term stay, survival and reproduction of human beings in space.
