China’s Shenzhou-23 launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 11:08 p.m. local time on Sunday, May 24, atop a Long March-2F (Y23) rocket, completing a rapid 3.5-hour autonomous rendezvous and docking with the Tiangong Space Station. The three-member crew includes Commander Zhu Yangzhu, Pilot Zhang Zhiyuan, and Payload Specialist Lai Ka-ying — the first person from Hong Kong to travel to space, and the first member of China’s fourth batch of taikonauts to fly a crewed mission.
The mission is also the first in which a Chinese taikonaut will remain in orbit for a full year — designated as China’s first long-duration spaceflight experiment, to gather data on human biological adaptation in space. The astronaut who will undertake the year-long stay (alongside two members of the future Shenzhou-24 crew) will be selected during the mission, based on physical and psychological evaluations. The result will be the longest continuous stay yet aboard Tiangong.
The launch follows by one day the joint inauguration by Presidents Xi Jinping and Putin of the China-Russia Years of Education, reported in yesterday’s briefing — the educational scaffolding that will, over time, produce the engineers and scientists for further such missions.