China’s youngest-ever astronaut crew has launched on a six-month mission to its space station, part of a growing space program that aims to send people to the Moon by 2030.
The Shenzhou-17 crew took off on a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Thursday morning at 11.14am (03:14 GMT).
Tang Hongbo, a 48-year-old former air force pilot who joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1995 and was on the first crewed mission to the Tiangong space station in 2021, leads the crew of three.
Tang Shengjie, 33, and Jiang Xinlin, 35, are the other astronauts, known as taikonauts in China, who are on their first trip to space.
With an average age of 38, the all-male crew is the youngest ever to man a space station mission.
After the rocket had been airborne for about 15 minutes, a space programme official proclaimed the launch a “complete success.”.
China’s “space dream” has gone into overdrive under President Xi Jinping.
In an effort to catch up with the United States and Russia, the world’s second-largest economy has poured billions of dollars into a military-run space program.
Tiangong, completed in late 2022, can house a maximum of three astronauts at an orbital altitude of up to 450km (280 miles) with an operational lifespan of more than 15 years.
The Shenzhou-17 astronauts will replace the Shenzhou-16 crew, which arrived at Tiangong in late May and will return to Earth on October 31.
