China’s second space lab blasts off

The first two-person crew to live aboard the spacelab is expected to launch aboard the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft in late October, China’s sixth piloted space mission since astronaut Yang Liwei was launched aboard the Shenzhou-5 spacecraft in 2003.

The most precise time-keeping device on the planet is officially off the planet and is now orbiting Earth in Tiangong-2, the second space station to be launched by China’s space program.

The Tiangong-2 – “Heavenly Palace” – was released from the booster about 10 minutes after liftoff, slipping into an orbit with a low point of 124 miles and a high point of about 250 miles. The two astronauts will work in the lab for 30 days, before reentering Earth’s atmosphere.

“The Tiangong II mission will lay a solid foundation and gather valuable experience for the building and operation of our future manned space station”, she said.

The astronauts expect to remain in Tiangong 2 for about a month, testing systems and processes for mid-term stays in space and refuelling, and conduct medical and other experiments. Chinese astronauts’ current longest space journey was a 15-day mission in June 2013 involving Shenzhou X and Tiangong I.

Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut and former International Space Station commander.

Tiangong-2 also has a new mechanical arm and larger living quarters with improved exercise and recreation facilities compared to China’s first space station, Tiangong-1, which is now abandoned and losing altitude. (NASA astronauts are now shuttled into space by Russia’s space program.) “It’s about national pride, but it’s also, as the Chinese would put it, ‘very dense in high technology.’ And it has military implications, and they are very upfront about this”.

The Tiangong-2 is created to last for two years as a base for experimentation in space.

China has launched its second short-term version of a space station.

The experiments will offer technologies for the space controlled ecological life support system, in which plants are a key biological component, in order to achieve the long-term goal of building a planting base at the space station.

It will enter into service around 2022, with an initial designed life of at least 10 years, Zhu Zongpeng told Xinhua.

With the ISS set to retire in 2024, the Chinese station will offer a promising alternative, and China will be the only country with a permanent space station. The only other nations to have successfully launched humans into space and landed probes on the moon are the USA and Russian Federation.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, China’s official press agency, Deputy Director Wu invited representatives of Russia, Germany, France, Italy and the European Space Agency to watch the launch of the Tiangong-2.