Monday, June 18, 2012

First Female Astronaut From China Blasts Into Space


Agence France-Presse — Getty Images- Liu Yang, China’s first woman in space, boarded a spacecraft in western China on Saturday.By and :  SHANGHAI — China sent a crew of three, including the country’s first female astronaut, into space on Saturday to carry out its first manned docking mission, an important step in an ambitious plan to build a Chinese space station by 2020.
The successful launching of the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft, powered by a Long March 2F rocket, was shown live on state television from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in western China.
The crew is expected to spend up to 20 days in space and dock with the orbiting Tiangong 1 space lab module, a kind of miniature space station, which China launched in September 2011. The crew will conduct experiments and live for a time in the space module. China has spent billions in the past decade to build a space program to compete with the United States and Russia, and it plans to eventually put a Chinese astronaut on the moon, perhaps by 2016... Continue reading...

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