“SPACE DREAM”
China has ramped up plans to achieve its “space dream” under President Xi Jinping.
Its space programme was the third to put humans in orbit and has also landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon.
Crewed by teams of three astronauts that are rotated every six months, the Tiangong space station is the programme’s crown jewel.
Beijing says it is on track to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030, where it intends to construct a base on the lunar surface.
The Shenzhou-19 crew’s time aboard Tiangong will see them carry out various experiments, including some involving “bricks” made from components imitating lunar soil, CCTV reported.
These items – to be delivered to Tiangong by the Tianzhou-8 cargo ship in November – will be tested to see how they fare in extreme radiation, gravity, temperature and other conditions.
Due to the high cost of transporting materials into space, Chinese scientists hope to be able to use lunar soil for the construction of the future base, CCTV reported.
The Shenzhou-19 mission is primarily about “accumulating additional experience”, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States, told AFP.
While this particular crew’s six-month stint aboard Tiangong may not witness major breakthroughs or feats, it is still “very valuable to do”, said McDowell.
China has in recent decades injected billions of dollars into developing an advanced space programme on par with the United States and Europe.
In 2019, China successfully landed its Chang’e-4 probe on the far side of the moon, the first spacecraft ever to do so. In 2021, it landed a small robot on Mars.
Tiangong, whose core module launched in 2021, is planned to be used for about 10 years.
