China Launches Astronauts To Newly Completed Space Station

Tall as a 20-story building, a rocket carrying the Shenzhou 15 mission roared into the night sky of the Gobi Desert on Tuesday, carrying three astronauts toward a rendezvous with China's just-completed space station. From a report: The rocket launch was a split-screen event for China, the latest in a long series of technological achievements for the country, even as many of its citizens have been angrily lashing out in the streets against stringent pandemic controls.The air shook as the huge white rocket leaped into a starry, bitterly cold night sky shortly before the setting of a waxing crescent moon. The expedition to the new space station is a milestone for China's rapidly advancing space program. It is the first time a team of three astronauts already aboard the Tiangong outpost will be met by a crew arriving from Earth. The Chinese space station will now be continuously occupied, like the International Space Station, another marker laid down by China in its race to catch up with the United States and surpass it as the dominant power in space. With a sustained presence in low-Earth orbit aboard Tiangong, Chinese space officials are preparing to put astronauts on the moon, which NASA also intends to revisit before the end of the decade as part of its Artemis program. "It will not take a long time; we can achieve the goal of manned moon landing," Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China's crewed space program, said in an interview at the launch center. China has been developing a lunar lander, he added, without giving a date when it might be used. The launch of Shenzhou 15 comes less than two weeks after NASA finally launched its Artemis I mission following many delays. That flight has put its uncrewed Orion capsule into orbit around the moon.

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