China to send new crew to its space station on Thursday

China will send a new crew to its Tiangong space station on Thursday, April 25 in the evening, the Chinese space agency announced. This mission is part of a Chinese program aimed at sending astronauts to the Moon by 2030, then building a base there.

The Shenzhou-18 mission, made up of three astronauts, will take off at 8:59 p.m. local time (2:59 p.m. in Paris) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, in northwest China. The crew will be led by Ye Guangfu, a fighter pilot and astronaut who previously crewed the Shenzhou-13 spacecraft in 2021. The crew will remain in orbit for six months, conducting experiments on gravity and physics, as well as the life sciences.

Tiangong is the flagship project of China’s space program, which has also landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon, and enabled China to become the third country to put humans into orbit. The space station crew consists of rotating teams of three astronauts. The new crew will replace that of the Shenzhou-17 mission, which was sent to the station in October.