China launched three astronauts to its Tiangong space station Sunday night aboard the Shenzhou-23 spacecraft, kicking off the country’s first year-long crewed space mission as Beijing presses forward toward a crewed lunar landing by 2030, the Associated Press reports.
The vessel lifted off at 11:08 p.m. local time from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on a Long March-2F Y23 rocket, state media reported. The launch came on schedule.
The three-member crew includes mission commander Zhu Yangzhu and pilot Zhang Zhiyuan, both officers in the People’s Liberation Army’s astronaut division, and payload specialist Li Jiaying, also known by her Cantonese name Lai Ka-ying. A former Hong Kong police inspector with a doctorate in computer forensics, Li is the first astronaut from Hong Kong to fly on a Chinese space mission.
One of the three crew members will remain aboard Tiangong for a full year, the China Manned Space Agency said Saturday. That would rank among the longest individual space stays ever recorded, though still short of the 14.5-month mark set by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995. The identity of the long-duration astronaut has not been announced and will be determined based on mission progress, the agency said.
The purpose of the yearlong stay is to “explore human adaptability and performance limits” in extended spaceflight environments, state media reported, building the physiological data required for the more demanding journey to and from the lunar surface.
Shenzhou-23’s crew is expected to relieve the Shenzhou-21 crew, who has been aboard Tiangong for more than 200 days. The new team will also conduct dozens of science and application experiments during the rotation.
China has been sending astronauts to Tiangong in six-month rotations since 2021. The station was built after China was effectively excluded from the International Space Station by U.S. law, which has barred NASA from direct cooperation with Beijing over national security concerns since 2011.
The launch is the latest development in a mounting competition between China and the United States for supremacy in deep space. NASA aims to land a crew on the lunar surface in 2028 under the Artemis program. In April, four NASA astronauts completed the Artemis II flyby of the moon, flying farther from Earth than any humans in more than 50 years. On Friday, SpaceX conducted a largely successful uncrewed test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket, designed to carry future NASA crews to the lunar surface.
China is targeting a crewed moon landing by 2030 and has announced plans to establish a permanent lunar base with Russia by 2035. U.S. officials have warned publicly that Beijing intends to claim and exploit lunar territory and resources. China has rejected those characterizations.
China’s lunar program chief scientist, Wu Weiren, has said the 2030 deadline is deliberately conservative. To meet it, China must complete development of new hardware for the lunar mission, including heavy-lift Long March-10 rockets, the Mengzhou spacecraft, and the Lanyue lunar lander.
The Shenzhou-23 mission will also execute China’s first autonomous rapid rendezvous and docking with the Tiangong core module, a procedure the space agency says is required for future deep-space operations.
China is also training two Pakistani astronauts, one of whom could join a short-duration mission to Tiangong later this year.
