“DREAM OF SPACE”

China has stepped up plans to realize its “space dream” under President Xi Jinping.

Its space program was the third to put humans into orbit and also landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon.

Made up of teams of three astronauts who alternate every six months, the Tiangong space station is the jewel of the program.

Beijing says it is on track to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030, where it intends to build a base on the lunar surface.

The Shenzhou-19 crew’s time aboard Tiangong will see them conduct various experiments, including some involving “bricks” made from components mimicking lunar soil, CCTV reported.

These items – which will be delivered to Tiangong by the Tianzhou-8 cargo ship in November – will be tested to see how they behave under extreme conditions of radiation, gravity, temperature and other conditions.

Due to the high cost of transporting materials into space, Chinese scientists hope to use lunar soil for the construction of the future base, CCTV reported.

The Shenzhou-19 mission aims above all to “accumulate additional experience”, explained to AFP Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States.

Although this crew’s six-month stay aboard the Tiangong did not witness any major breakthroughs or feats, it was still “very valuable to do,” McDowell said.

Over the past decades, China has poured billions of dollars into developing an advanced space program, comparable to that of the United States and Europe.

In 2019, China successfully landed its Chang’e-4 probe on the ground. the hidden side of the moonthe first spacecraft to do so. In 2021, he landed a small robot on Mars.

Tiangong, whose core module was launched in 2021, is expected to be used for about 10 years.