China will take its next step toward a large space station on Thursday, when it intends to launch the Tiangong-2 laboratory into orbit. 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. The launch is set for 10:04am ET (15:04pm BST) Thursday, and live video is available.

This space station, "Heavenly Palace 2," will be China's second after it launched the similarly sized Tiangong-1 laboratory in 2011. Following this week's launch, China plans to send two taikonauts to Tiangong-2 in four to six weeks aboard a Shenzhou-11 spacecraft. They will live there for about a month, testing out the lab's life support systems and performing scientific research. According to China's official news service, Xinhua, those experiments will involve areas of medicine, physics, and biology, as well as quantum key transmission, space atomic clock, and solar storm research.

As part of its robust space plan, China intends to scale up to a full-size space station during the next decade. To help lay the groundwork for that station, Chinese space officials have said they will launch the country's first robotic resupply mission, Tianzhou-1 ("Heavenly vessel"), in 2017, to the Tiangong-2 lab. The larger, modular station China is planning may have a mass of about 60 tons. That would be considerably larger than the Tiangdong laboratories but still moderately sized compared to the 420-ton International Space Station.

The launch of China's larger station could coincide with the possible abandonment of the International Space Station, which NASA and its partners have committed to until 2024. After that time, Russia may go its own way, and China has reached out to some European nations involved in the ISS to invite them to visit its station in the mid-2020s. China is also interested in collaborating with the United States, but Congress has passed legislation that forbids NASA from working directly with the nation on spaceflight activities.