“New step” for China in the conquest of space: three taikonauts took off on Sunday June 5 for the “Heavenly Palace”, the station that Beijing is building in orbit and which should now be permanently occupied.
The spacecraft for their Shenzhou-14 mission was powered by a Long March 2F rocket, which lifted off at 10:44 a.m. local time (2:44 a.m. GMT) from Jiuquan Launch Center in the northern Gobi Desert. -west of the country.
Public broadcaster CCTV broadcast images of the launch live.
A quarter of an hour later, an official of the space agency in charge of manned flights announced the "success" of the launch.
Like the previous crew of the Shenzhou-13 mission, who returned in mid-April, the three taikonauts should stay on the space station for about six months.
Named in Chinese Tiangong ("Heavenly Palace"), this station should be fully operational by the end of the year.
The crew includes Liu Yang, 43, who was the first Chinese woman in space in 2012.
👩🚀Liu Yang #刘洋, crew member, #Shenzhou XIV mission.
👍Liu took part in the Shenzhou IX mission that lasted nearly 13 days in June 2012, becoming the first Chinese woman in outer #space.
📸/IC] #Shenzhou14 pic.twitter.com/wS3axGd15H
— Chinese Space Station (@CNSpaceStation) June 4, 2022
Main challenge for the crew of Shenzhou-14: receiving and installing two new laboratory modules, which will be docked at the station.
They will be launched from Earth in July and October.
The latter will considerably increase the volume and scale of the space station.
Towards a permanent presence in space
These crucial procedures will need to be performed in coordination with engineers on Earth.
"China has never carried out such a complex operation before, which has only taken place on Mir and the International Space Station (ISS). It will be a real test for the crew and the equipment," said Chen Lan.
Once these laboratory modules have been installed, the general structure of the station will have its final appearance, T-shaped. It will then be similar in size to the former Russian-Soviet Mir station.
Its lifespan should be at least ten years, even fifteen years.
The Shenzhou-14 crew will also perform spacewalks, conduct a series of experiments and maintain Tiangong.
New for this mission: for the first time, two Chinese crews will pass the baton in orbit in the station.
Shenzhou-14 预计发射倒计时 - 120 hrs。
（图：Xinhua） pic.twitter.com/j073weYjtJ
— Seger YU (@SegerYu) May 31, 2022
Towards the end of their stay, before returning to Earth, the three taikonauts from Shenzhou-14 will in fact spend a few days in orbit with their three colleagues from the future Shenzhou-15 mission.
"With Shenzhou-14, Chinese manned spaceflight is taking a new step" with "the start of the station's permanent occupation," Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told AFP. United States.
"In other words, from now on, the goal is for there to always be Chinese astronauts in space."
An ambitious space project
China has been pushed to build its own station due to its exclusion from the ISS, as the United States prohibits Nasa from working with Beijing.
The Asian giant has been investing billions of euros in its space program for several decades.
China sent its first taikonaut into space in 2003. Since then, it has achieved some remarkable feats, especially in recent years.
At the beginning of 2019, it placed a machine on the far side of the Moon, a world first.
In 2020, it brought back samples from the Moon and finalized Beidou, its satellite navigation system, a competitor to the American GPS.
>> To read also: "With Beidou, Beijing concretizes its 'new space silk roads'"
In 2021, it landed a small robot on Mars, and it now plans to send men to the Moon by 2030. In the longer term, China plans to offer space tourism, Zhou said in March. Jianping, the conductor of the Chinese manned program.
With AFP
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