The Tiangong 2 was carried into space on Thursday night atop a Long March 7 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China.
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Tiangong 2 reportedly carries 14 experiments.
China’s first-ever space lab will die a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere toward the end of next year, Chinese officials said.
The first Chinese astronauts, or taikonauts, will arrive at the 8.6-ton, 60-foot-wide space station for a 30-day stay in October, traveling in a Shenzhou spacecraft.
China is not part of the multinational consortium, led by the United States and Russian Federation, that operates the 440-ton (400 metric ton) International Space Station. (NASA astronauts are now shuttled into space by Russia’s space program.) “It’s about national pride, but it’s also, as the Chinese would put it, ‘very dense in high technology.’ And it has military implications, and they are very upfront about this”.
It should be noted that to date, China has managed to implement its program, in general adhering to its originally established schedule without any unforeseen accidents.
Tiangong-1 stopped sending data back to Earth in March 2016, officially ending the space lab’s mission.
As a major breakthrough in the “three step strategy” proposed by Chinese scientists toward the goal of building a permanent manned space station, the Tiangong2 is expected to further boost the development of China’s space exploration. Also worrisome is the fact that the guidance technologies developed for rockets and spacecraft can also be used for ballistic missiles. By then, astronauts could be stationed in orbit for missions that last more than one year, he added. Tiangong-2 later will be positioned into a circular orbit at an altitude of 238 miles, about 15 miles below the International Space Station. It’s a smaller model of the permanent station that China plans to have in orbit sometime in 2022. It will be able to house a maximum of six astronauts at the same time and manned missions will become routine once the space station enters service.
China was late to the space race – it didn’t send its first satellite into space until 1970 – just after the United States put the first man on the moon.
China is pouring billions into its space program and working to catch up with the U.S. and Europe.
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China also aims to send the Chang’e-5 probe to the moon and return with lunar samples in the second half of 2017, and to land a probe on Mars by 2021.
