JIUQUAN, (China): A new crew took off for China’s space station on Friday, including the country’s youngest ever astronaut and four lab mice.
The Long March-2F rocket carrying the Shenzhou-21 mission crew lifted off at 11:44 pm (1544 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, AFP journalists saw.
The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are exchanged every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space programme, into which billions of dollars have been poured in a bid to catch up with the United States and Russia.
China has bold plans to send a crewed mission to the Moon by the end of the decade and eventually to build a base on the lunar surface.
Mission commander and veteran space pilot Zhang Lu is accompanied by 32-year-old flight engineer Wu Fei, China’s youngest astronaut to undertake a space mission, and payload specialist Zhang Hongzhang, 39.
The three astronauts waved goodbye to colleagues and family members at the remote launch base in the Gobi Desert as a band played a patriotic song.
Zhang Lu told reporters on Thursday he was confident his team would “report back to our motherland and its people with complete success”.
Space first-timer Wu told a news conference on Thursday that he felt “incomparably lucky”.
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