JIUQUAN, China — China declared a “complete success” after launching a new three-person crew to its orbiting space station on Wednesday, as the country seeks to expand its space exploration with missions to the Moon and beyond.

The Shenzhou-19 spacecraft carrying the trio lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 4:27 a.m. local time atop a Long March-2F rocket, the backbone of China’s crewed space missions.

“The condition of the crew is good and the launch was successful,” state broadcaster China Central Television announced.

China built its own space station after being excluded from the International Space Station, primarily due to U.S. concerns over overall control of the space program of the People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s lunar program is part of a growing rivalry with the United States and other countries, including Japan and India.

The team of two men and one woman will replace the astronauts who have been living on the Tiangong space station for six months. They are expected to stay until April or May next year.

The new mission commander, Cai Xuzhe, traveled to space on the Shenzhou-14 mission in 2022, while the other two, Song Lingdong and Wang Haoze, are first-time space travelers, born in the 1990s.

Song was an air force pilot and Wang was an engineer at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Wang will be the crew’s payload specialist and the third Chinese woman aboard a crewed mission.

In addition to putting a space station into orbit, the Chinese space agency landed an explorer on Mars. It aims to send a person to the Moon before 2030, which would make China the second country after the United States to do so. It also plans to build a research station on the Moon and has already transferred rock and soil samples from the little-explored far side of the Moon, a world first.

The United States is still at the forefront of space exploration and plans to send astronauts to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years, although NASA pushed the target date back to 2026 earlier this year.

The new crew will conduct spacewalks and install new equipment to protect the station from space debris, some of which was created by China.

According to NASA, large debris was created by “explosions and satellite collisions.” China’s firing of a rocket to destroy a redundant weather satellite in 2007 and the “accidental collision of U.S. and Russian communications satellites in 2009 significantly increased the amount of large debris in orbit,” the statement said.

Chinese space authorities say they have measures in place in case their astronauts need to return to Earth sooner.

China launched its first crewed mission in 2003, becoming the third country to do so after the former Soviet Union and the United States. The space program is a source of enormous national pride and a hallmark of China’s technological progress over the past two decades.

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