China will send an astronaut to its space station on Sunday for a one-year mission, the longest duration for the country so far. The mission will help study long-duration human physiology in space as China works toward a crewed Moon landing by 2030.
The Shenzhou-23 vessel is scheduled to launch at 23:08 local time (15:08 GMT), using the Long March-2F Y23 carrier rocket, from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China with three Chinese astronauts on board.
Payload specialist Li Jiaying, a former Hong Kong police inspector, will be the first astronaut from the city to take part in a Chinese space mission.
The other crew members are commander Zhu Yangzhu and pilot Zhang Yuanzhi, both from the People's Liberation Army's astronaut division.
One of the three astronauts is to stay on the Tiangong space station for a year, one of the longest space missions ever, but short of the 14-and-a-half-month record set by a Russian cosmonaut in 1995.
That chosen astronaut will be decided later, depending on the progress of the mission, the China Manned Space Agency said on Saturday.
China has sent astronauts to its space station nearly a dozen times, but this launch comes amid an accelerating space race with the United States.
The U.S. has warned about what it alleges are China’s plans to colonise and mine lunar territory and resources. Beijing has strongly rejected those claims.
NASA is seeking to achieve a crewed moon landing in 2028, two years ahead of China. The U.S. aims to establish a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
In April, four NASA astronauts made a historic trip around the moon as part of the Artemis II mission, flying farther from Earth than anyone before in the world's first crewed lunar mission in half a century.
On Friday, Elon Musk's SpaceX made a largely successful, uncrewed test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket, which is designed to enable more frequent Starlink satellite launches and to send future NASA missions to the moon.
China, with less than four years until its 2030 deadline, faces a tall order of developing entirely new hardware and software specific to its lunar mission, proving it is mission-ready.
That will ensure its astronauts, used to the relative safety of Tiangong in low-Earth orbit, can safely make the riskier transition to the moon's surface.
Goal of permanent lunar base by 2035
The previous mission, Shenzhou-22, was launched ahead of schedule in November to return three Chinese astronauts to Earth after their Shenzhou-20 vessel was damaged by space debris in orbit.
China has only sent robots to the moon, but its successive Shenzhou missions highlight the country's rapidly improving space capabilities. In June 2024, China became the first country to recover lunar samples from the moon's far side, using robots.
A successful crewed landing before 2030 would boost China's plans to establish a permanent base on the moon by 2035 with Russia.
The Chinese lunar programme's chief scientist, Wu Weiren, has said Beijing's public timeline is intentionally conservative.
The Shenzhou-23 flight will execute the first autonomous rapid rendezvous and docking procedure with the core module of Tiangong in preparation for the 2030 mission.
Scientists will also study the physiological effects of radiation exposure, bone density loss and psychological stress in space for the extended duration of the Shenzhou-23 mission.
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