China is to send its first civilian astronaut into space as part of a crewed mission to the Tiangong space station today, as it pursues its ambitious plans for a crewed lunar landing by 2030.
The world’s second-largest economy has invested billions of US dollars in its military-run space program, trying to catch up with the US and Russia after years of belatedly matching their milestones.
All Chinese astronauts previously sent into space had been part of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
Photo: AP
Gui Haichao (桂海潮) is a professor at Beijing’s Beihang University, and would manage scientific experiments on the station during the mission, China Manned Space Agency deputy director Lin Xiqiang (林西強) told reporters yesterday.
His mission would “carry out large-scale, in-orbit experiments ... in the study of novel quantum phenomena, high-precision space time-frequency systems, the verification of general relativity and the origin of life,” Lin said.
“I’ve always had this dream,” Gui told a news conference yesterday.
His university said that he hailed from an “ordinary family” in the southwest province of Yunnan.
He had “first felt the attraction of aerospace” listening to the news of China’s first man in space, Yang Liwei (楊利偉), on campus radio in 2003, the university wrote on social media.
Gui’s addition is “particularly significant,” independent analyst Chen Lan said, adding that previous missions only carried astronauts trained as pilots responsible for more technical tasks and were not specialist scientists.
“It means that, from this mission on, China will open the door to space for ordinary people,” he said.
Gui is set to take off onboard the Shenzhou-16 spacecraft from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China today at 9:31am, the space agency said.
Space Commander Jing Haipeng (景海鵬) would lead the mission — on his fourth expedition into space, state media reported.
The third crew member would be engineer Zhu Yangzhu (主養豬).
Jing said he had not gone home for nearly four years due to fears that travel could disrupt his training.
“As astronauts going into space ... our main responsibility and mission is striving for glory for our country,” he said.
The three are to stay in Earth’s orbit for about five months.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), plans for China’s “space dream” have been put into overdrive.
China is planning to build a base on the moon, and Lin yesterday said that Beijing plans to land a crewed mission there by 2030.
“The overall goal is to achieve China’s first manned landing on the moon by 2030 and carry out lunar scientific exploration and related technological experiments,” he said.
The final module of the T-shaped Tiangong — whose name means “heavenly palace” — successfully docked with the core structure last year.
The station carries several pieces of cutting-edge scientific equipment, Xinhua news agency reported, including “the world’s first space-based cold atomic clock system.”
The Tiangong is expected to remain in low Earth orbit at 400km to 450km above the planet for at least 10 years.
It is constantly crewed by rotating teams of three astronauts.
While China does not plan to use Tiangong for global cooperation on the scale of the International Space Station, Beijing has said it is open to foreign collaboration.
China “is looking forward to and welcomes the participation of foreign astronauts in the country’s space station flight missions,” Lin said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS