China To Launch Tiangong-2 Space Lab

The 8.5-ton, 10.4-meter-long facility will launch from the Jiuquan launch center in the Gobi Desert, aboard a Long March 2-F rocket.

Astronauts could soon be stationed in orbit for missions that last more than one year, Zhu said. “A Shenzhou-11 spacecraft will ferry the taikonauts up for a monthlong stay on the lab”, reported by Engadget.

Next month two crew will dock the station to carry out research.

Wu says Tiangong-2 has several upgrades compared with Tiangong-1, which launched in 2011.

The station will also contain cardiovascular health experiments, a quantum communications experiment, a plant cultivation study and a gamma-ray burst instrument called POLAR, which is a collaboration between Chinese, Swiss and Polish scientists.

A source of enormous national pride, China’s space program plans a total of 20 missions this year at a time when the US and other countries’ programs are seeking new roles. How well NASA and the other space agencies who frequent the ISS are going to get along with their new neighbor remains to be seen, but China, like the United States, has publicly advocated for the pacifistic use of space. The final approvals came just as India was giving approvals to ISRO’s Chandrayaan mission.

It’ll be about the size of the Russian Space Station Mir, which operated in the 1980s and 1990s. The original target date was 2010, but now, the project will see fruition only sometime in the 2020s.

According to Wu, Tiangong-2 is comprised of two parts: an orbital module where the crew will reside and work, and a service module, which houses propulsion, life support and docking equipment.

The space lab being launched Thursday makes improvements over its predecessor, Tiangong-1.

China is now somewhere between Phase 2 and Phase 3.

China is continuing its relentless pursuit of space travel with the imminent launch of a new “space laboratory” later this month. This was accomplished with the 4 missions of Shenzhou 7 to Shenzhou 10.

It is expected to fall back to Earth in the second half of next year, she added. Chinese astronauts visited Tiangong-1 on two different occasions, spending about eight and 12 days aboard the lab in June 2012 and June 2013, respectively. They are planned to arrive with Shenzhou-11 spacecraft in mid-October.

The space lab is now intact and orbiting at an average height of 370 kilometers, she said. Watch the Tiangong-2 launch live below.

The station, whose name means “Heavenly Palace”, is considered a stepping stone to a mission to Mars by the end of the decade.