Today, on October 30, China launched a Long March 2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center as scheduled, whose mission is to transport three astronauts in the Shenzhou 19 mission to the Tiangong space station. The team will be the eighth batch of inhabitants of the Tiangong, which was completed in late 2022.
Chinese astronauts Cai Xuzhe, Song Lingdong and Wang Haoze will take over the massive orbital outpost (前哨轨道) from their peers in the Shenzhou 18 and stay there for about six months to carry out the Shenzhou-19 crewed spaceflight mission. The two groups will live together for about four days for handover work, and then the Shenzhou 18 astronauts Ye Guangfu, Li Cong and Li Guangsu will depart and fly back to Earth on Monday. The three Shenzhou-18 astronauts expressed their excitement for the “reunion” in the space station.
Cai, the commander, was part of the six-month Shenzhou 14 mission (with Chen Dong and Liu Yang) that lasted from June 2022 to December that year. While for Song and Wang, who are both post-90s (born after 1990), it’s their first time to fly to space.
Wang Haoze, 34, is the third Chinese woman to go to space, after Liu Yang and Wang Yaping, and the first female spaceflight engineer. Before her, a male astronaut who took part in the Shenzhou 16 mission, is China’s first spaceflight engineer. She is also the only woman in the country’s third-generation group of astronauts. There are 18 in the third generation and they were selected in October 2020 from about 2,500 applicants.
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