JIUQUAN, China — China will send its first woman into space on June 16 along with two other astronauts to work on a temporary space station for about a week, in a key step toward becoming the only third nation to set up a permanent base in orbit.
Liu Yang, a 34-year-old air force pilot, and two
male colleagues will be launched Saturday aboard the Shenzhou 9
spacecraft, which will dock with the bus-sized Tiangong 1 space module
now orbiting at 343 kilometers (213 miles) above the Earth.
“Arranging
for women astronauts to fly is not only a must for the development of
human spaceflight, but also the expectation of the public,” space
program spokeswoman Wu Ping said. “This is a landmark event.”
Two
of the astronauts will live and work inside the module to test its
life-support systems while the third will remain in the capsule to deal
with any unexpected emergencies. Wu said the mission will last more than
10 days before the astronauts travel back to Earth in the capsule,
landing on Western Chinese grasslands with the help of parachutes.
The
rocket began fueling Friday at the Jiugquan Satellite Launch Center on
the edge of the Gobi desert in northern China, Wu told reporters at the
center. The launch is scheduled for 6:37 p.m. (1237 GMT) Saturday, she
said.
Joining Liu, a major, is veteran astronaut and mission commander Jing Hai and newcomer Liu Wang, both air force senior colonels.
“You could say this mission is a combination of the old and the new and coordination between the male and female,” Wu said.
Success
in docking — and in living and working aboard the Tiangong 1 — would
smooth the way for more ambitious projects, including the creation of a
permanent space station and missions to the moon, and add to China’s
international prestige in line with its growing economic prowess.
China is hoping to join the United States and Russia
as the only countries to have sent independently maintained space
stations into orbit. It already is in the exclusive three-nation club to
have launched a spacecraft with astronauts on its own.
The
mission demonstrates China’s commitment to “long-term human spaceflight”
and marks a test of “the technological capabilities requisite for a
future permanent space station,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on
the Chinese space program at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island.
Still,
that is some years away. The Tiangong 1 is only a prototype, and the
plan is to replace it with a permanent — and bigger — space station due
for completion around 2020.
The permanent station will weigh about
60 tons, slightly smaller than NASA’s Skylab of the 1970s and about
one-sixth the size of the 16-nation International Space Station.
Analysts
say China’s exclusion from the ISS, largely on objections from the
United States, was one of the key spurs for it to pursue an independent
program 20 years ago, which reaches a high point with Saturday’s launch.
The
three astronauts will perform medicals tests on the effect of
weightlessness on the human body, as well as other scientific and
engineering tasks on Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which was put into
orbit in September.
Wu said the capsule would first dock by remote
control, then later separate and dock again manually, to prepare the
technology for a permanent space station.
“After we have realized both the auto and manual docking technology, we can completely master this technology,” she said.
China
first launched a man into space in 2003 followed by a two-man mission
in 2005 and a three-man trip in 2008 that featured China’s first space
walk.
In November 2011, the unmanned Shenzhou 8 successfully
docked with the Tiangong 1 by remote control — twice to show the
durability of the system.
While operating with limited resources,
China’s space program is a source of huge national pride and enjoys
top-level political and military backing. This has left it largely
immune from the budgetary pressures affecting NASA, although China
doesn’t say what it spends on the program.
The selection of the
first female astronaut is giving the program an additional publicity
boost. State media have gushed this week about Liu, pointing out that
she once successfully landed her plane after a bird strike disabled one
of its engines.
Shortly after Wu’s news conference, reporters were
driven to a second building for a question and answer session with the
astronauts, who were dressed in blue jump suits and seated behind a
glass partition.
“We won’t let you down. We will work together and
successfully complete this mission,” said Liu Yang, who like China’s
other female astronaut candidates is married and has a child, a
requirement because of fears that exposure to space radiation could
affect fertility
