JIUQUAN, China — China declared a “complete success” after it launched a new three-person crew to its orbiting space station early Wednesday as the country seeks to expand its exploration of outer space with missions to the moon and beyond.
The Shenzhou-19 spaceship carrying the trio blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 4:27 a.m. local time atop a Long March-2F rocket, the backbone of China’s crewed space missions.
“The crew condition is good and the launch has been successful,” the state broadcaster China Central Television announced.
China built its own space station after being excluded from the International Space Station, mainly because of U.S. concerns over the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese Communist Party’s military arm’s overall control over the space program. China’s program is part of a growing rivalry with the U.S. and others, including Japan and India.
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The team of two men and one woman will replace the astronauts who have lived on the Tiangong space station for the past six months. They are expected to stay until April or May of next year.
The new mission commander, Cai Xuzhe, went to space in the Shenzhou-14 mission in 2022, while the other two, Song Lingdong and Wang Haoze, are first-time space travelers, born in the 1990s.
Song was an air force pilot and Wang an engineer with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Wang will be the crew’s payload specialist and the third Chinese woman aboard a crewed mission.
Besides putting a space station into orbit, the Chinese space agency has landed an explorer on Mars. It aims to put a person on the moon before 2030, which would make China the second nation after the United States to do so. It also plans to build a research station on the moon and has already transferred rock and soil samples from the little-explored far side of the moon in a global first.
The U.S. still leads in space exploration and plans to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, though NASA pushed the target date back this year to 2026.
The new crew will perform spacewalks and install new equipment to protect the station from space debris, some of which was created by China.
