JIUQUAN, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) — China on Thursday launched space lab Tiangong-2 into space, paving the way for a permanent space station the country plans to build around 2022.<\/p>\n
In a cloud of brown smoke, Tiangong-2 roared into the air underneath a mid-autumn full moon from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the back of a Long March-2F rocket, trailing a vast volume of flame.<\/p>\n
Once in space, the 8.6-tonne Tiangong-2 will maneuver itself into an orbit about 380 kilometers above Earth for initial on-orbit tests, Wu Ping, deputy director of China’s manned space engineering office, said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The space lab will then transfer to a slightly higher orbit at about 393 kilometers above Earth, a height at which the future Chinese space station will be operating, before the Shenzhou-11 manned spaceship ferries two male astronauts into space to dock with the lab. The two astronauts will work in the lab for 30 days, before reentering Earth’s atmosphere.<\/p>\n
In April 2017, China’s first cargo ship Tianzhou-1, which literally means “heavenly vessel,” will also be sent into orbit to dock with the space lab and provide it with fuel and other supplies.<\/p>\n
Wu said experts will verify and evaluate key technologies involved in on-orbit propellant resupply and equipment repairing, as well as those related to astronauts’ long-term stay in space in the mission process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JIUQUAN, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) — China on Thursday launched space lab Tiangong-2 into space, paving the way for a permanent space station the country plans to build around 2022. In a cloud of brown smoke, Tiangong-2 roared into the air underneath a mid-autumn full moon from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the back of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}