Headed for a Heavenly Palace (Image: AFP/Getty Images)

Update, 11 June 2013: The China National Space Administration successfully launched its Shenzhou-10 mission to low Earth orbit at 0938 GMT today. The Long March 2F rocket lifted off flawlessly from the Jiuquan space centre in Mongolia’s Gobi desert and headed towards the fledgling spacefaring nation’s space station, Tiangong 1, around which it is expected to test manoeuvres before docking for a 15-day stay on orbit.

Original article, published 10 June 2013

China will launch the Shenzhou-10 spacecraft on 11 June, lofting three astronauts on a 15-day mission to learn how to rendezvous and dock with an orbiting module. The mission is the last of three scheduled experiments designed to help astronauts master the skills for building and operating a space station.


If all goes to plan, the mission will mark the end of the beginning of China’s slow but steady approach to human space flight. Right now, the country is not doing anything revolutionary. But progress so far suggests that more advanced plans, such as a moon base or a crewed Martian trek, may not be beyond China’s reach.

In a press conference Monday, a spokeswoman for the Chinese human space programme, Wu Ping, announced that Shenzhou-10 will lift off at 0938 UTC, according to the Chinese news service Xinhua. The capsule will carry two men, Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang, and one woman, Wang Yaping.

The astronauts will rendezvous with the Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace 1) space module, which has been orbiting Earth since September 2011. The crew will do one automatic and one manual docking test. They will also run medical and technical tests and broadcast a science lesson to Chinese students from orbit.

Very ambitious

The launch continues the execution of an orderly programme laid out in the 1990s, says Joan Johnson-Freese of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

“It’s a slow, incremental programme, but it’s also very ambitious,” she says. China started with the uncrewed launch of the Shenzhou 1 spacecraft in 1999 and continued with its first crewed launch in 2003. This week’s lift-off will mark their fifth human mission in 10 years.

The ultimate goal is to build a space station by 2020. What China plans to do with the space station is still unclear, and they may need a new heavy launch vehicle called the Long March 5 in order to build it.

There is a good chance they can make it happen, in part because China’s approach has been markedly different from the frenetic space race between the US and the USSR in the 1960s and ’70s, says Johnson-Freese.

“There was a space race between the US and Russia because we each started at the same place. But for China there’s no race [with the US], because we’re at very different starting positions,” she says.

Persistent effort

The two countries also have different political attitudes towards space exploration. “What we have seen more than anything else is a truly long-term commitment to space that dates back at least 25 years, and a sustained interest during those 25 years,” says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy research group in Washington DC.

By contrast, NASA’s human spaceflight programme has struggled under changing budgets and political whims. Plans to return to the moon under George W. Bush’s administration, for instance, morphed into crewed missions to an asteroid under Barack Obama’s presidency.

When it comes to sending humans beyond Earth orbit, China’s unwavering goals may see it beat other space powers like the US to the punch, says Cheng. “So as long as the money holds out and political stability reigns, they might well get to some place like Mars or establish a lunar presence, precisely because they are persistent and willing to spend the money and make the effort.”