Space mission sees first Chinese woman in orbit

Published on 17/06/2012 00:00

THREE Chinese astronauts – including the first Chinese woman to be sent into space – arrived yesterday at a launch site for the country’s most ambitious space mission.

Female astronaut Liu Yang, 33, and two male crew members – veteran astronaut Jing Haipeng and newcomer Liu Wang – are to dock the spacecraft with a space module in a key step toward building a space station. They will work there for about a week.

The chairman of the National People’s Congress standing committee, Wu Bangguo, told the crew in a sending-off ceremony: “the country and people await your victorious return.”

Two of the astronauts will live and work inside the module to test its life-support systems while the third will remain in the capsule to deal with any unexpected emergencies.

Success in docking and in living and working aboard the space module would smooth the way for more ambitious future projects, including the building of a permanent space station and missions to the moon.

China is hoping to join the United States and Russia as the only countries to send independently maintained space stations into orbit. It already is in the exclusive three-nation club of those that have launched manned spacecraft on their own.

The module, called Tiangong 1, is only a prototype. The plan is to replace it with a larger permanent space station, weighing about 60 tonnes – slightly smaller than Nasa’s Skylab of the 1970s – and due for completion around 2020.