China is planning to send its youngest astronaut, along with four lab mice, to its Tiangong Space Station, authorities said on Thursday.
The Tiangong space station—crewed by a team of three astronauts who are exchanged every six months—remains a centrepiece of the country’s space exploration programme. China has invested billions of dollars into its space programme to catch up with Russia and the United States.
A spokesperson from China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said on Thursday that the Shenzhou-21 mission is set to take off at 11:44 pm on Friday (1544 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China.
Flight engineer Wu Fei, aged 32, is set to become the youngest Chinese astronaut to undertake a space mission, authorities said. "I feel incomparably lucky for being able to integrate my personal dreams into the glorious journey of China's space programme is the greatest fortune this era has bestowed upon me."
He will be joined by a veteran space pilot, Zhang Lu, 48, who took part in the Shenzhou-15 mission more than two years ago in 2023.
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Meanwhile, the payload specialist Zhang Hongzhang, 39, will be the third astronaut member of the crew. A CMSA spokesperson added that four mice, including two male and two female, will accompany the crew as part of China’s first in-orbit biological experiments on rodents.
Commander Zhang expressed confidence in the mission’s outcome, saying he was pretty confident that his team would “report back to the country and its people with complete success”. China is the third country to put humans in orbit and has also landed robotic rovers on the Moon and Mars.
China under Xi Jinping aims to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030, where it intends to construct a base on the lunar surface. Officials say China is testing modules meant to be sent to the Moon along with the crew by the end of this decade.
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