Agence France-Presse — Getty Images- Liu Yang, China’s first woman in space, boarded a spacecraft in western China on Saturday.By DAVID BARBOZA and KEVIN DREW:
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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