China launched its Shenzhou-23 mission on Sunday, which will see a Chinese astronaut spend a full year in orbit for the first time, a crucial step in Beijing’s ambition to send humans to the Moon by 2030.
The Long March 2-F rocket blasted off in a cloud of flames and smoke on time at 11:08 pm (1508 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch centre in China’s northwestern Gobi Desert, video from state broadcaster CCTV showed.
The mission marks the first spaceflight ever undertaken by an astronaut from Hong Kong: 43-year-old Li Jiaying (Lai Ka-ying in Cantonese), who previously worked for the Hong Kong police.
Other crew members include 39-year-old space engineer Zhu Yangzhu and 39-year-old Zhang Zhiyuan, a former air force pilot, who is travelling into space for the first time.
The crew is set to carry out numerous scientific projects in life sciences, materials science, fluid physics and medicine.
A key experiment of Shenzhou-23 will be the full-year stay in orbit by one of the crew in order to study the effects of a long stay in microgravity.
