Beijing - China on Sunday is set to launch a new three-astronaut mission to complete work on its permanent orbiting space station, Tiangong, the country’s China Manned Space Agency said Saturday.

A Long March-2F rocket carrying the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft is set to blast off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the northwestern province of Gansu at 10:44 a.m. local time (0244 GMT) on Sunday, an agency official told at a news conference.

The Shenzhou 14 crew will spend six months on Tiangong, during which they will oversee the addition of two laboratory modules to join the main Tianhe living space that was launched in April 2021.

Shenzhou-14 will be the third of four crewed missions - and the seventh of a total of 11 missions - needed to complete the space station by the end of the year.

China’s space program launched its first astronaut into orbit in 2003, making China only the third country to do so on its own after the former Soviet Union and the U.S. The country began constructing its three-module space station in April 2021 with the launch of Tianhe - the first and biggest of the station's three modules.

Tianhe, slightly larger than a metro bus, will form the living quarters of visiting astronauts once the T-shaped space station is completed.

China’s space program is run by the ruling Communist Party’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army, prompting the U.S. to exclude it from the International Space Station.

Commander Chen Dong and fellow astronauts Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe will be joined at the end of their mission for three to five days by the crew of the upcoming Shenzhou 15, marking the first time the station will have had six people aboard.

The space station will have a designed lifespan of a decade. At 180 tonnes, it will be slightly heavier than Russia's decommissioned Mir, and about 20% of the International Space Station by mass.
-AP/Reuters