China sends youngest astronaut, mice to space station

AFP | Beijing

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A new crew took off for China’s space station on Friday, including the country’s youngest ever astronaut and four lab mice.

The Long March-2F rocket carrying the Shenzhou-21 mission crew lifted off at 11:44 pm (1544 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, AFP journalists saw.

The Tiangong space station -- crewed by teams of three astronauts that are exchanged every six months -- is the crown jewel of China’s space programme, into which billions of dollars have been poured in a bid to catch up with the United States and Russia.

China has bold plans to send a crewed mission to the Moon by the end of the decade and eventually to build a base on the lunar surface.

Mission commander and veteran space pilot Zhang Lu is accompanied by 32-yearold flight engineer Wu Fei, China’s youngest astronaut to undertake a space mission, and payload specialist Zhang Hongzhang, 39.

The three astronauts waved goodbye to colleagues and family members at the remote launch base in the Gobi Desert as a band played a patriotic song.

Zhang Lu told reporters on Thursday he was confident his team would “report back to our motherland and its people with complete success”.

Space first-timer Wu told a news conference on Thursday that he felt “incomparably lucky”.

Four mice -- two male and two female -- join them as the subjects of China’s first in-orbit experiments on rodents.

Shenzhou-21 is expected to dock with Tiangong around three-and-a-half hours after takeoff.

Beijing’s space programme is the third to put humans in orbit, after the United States and the former Soviet Union.