Beijing
Reuters
—
China’s Shenzhou 21 space rocket and its crew, including the youngest member of its astronaut corps, lifted off Friday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China atop the Long March 2F rocket, state media reported.
This was the seventh mission of China’s permanent habitation space station since its completion in 2022.
The mission on China’s Shenzhou 21 spacecraft involves three astronauts staying in space for six months, with younger astronauts increasingly replacing veteran astronauts. The 2020 program participants are Zhang Hongzhang (39 years old) and Wu Fei (32 years old), the youngest Chinese astronauts to be sent into space for the first time.
Captain Zhang Lu, 48, flew the Shenzhou 15 mission in 2022.
The Shenzhou 21 astronauts will succeed the Shenzhou 20 crew, who lived and worked in Tiangong (the “Heavenly Palace”) for more than six months. The Shenzhou 20 astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth within a few days.
The Shenzhou 21 crew also included four black rats, the first small mammals brought to the Chinese space station. Mice will be used for reproductive experiments in low Earth orbit.
Twice a year is the norm for the Shenzhou program, and in the past year it has reached new milestones, including sending a Chinese astronaut born in the 1990s and setting a world record for extravehicular activity.Next year, there are plans to train and send the first foreign astronaut from Pakistan to Tiangong.
This rapid progress has set off alarm bells in Washington, which is now racing to land American astronauts on the moon again before China.
The two countries are also competing in early institution-building efforts, with the U.S.-led Artemis Agreement on lunar exploration facing off against the China- and Russia-led International Lunar Research Station.
