China’s Shenzhou-12 has exploded into space with three astronauts Space News

The spacecraft took off around 1:22 a.m. Thursday from northwest China, increasing the country’s space program to compete with the U.S.

China has successfully launched Shenzhou-12 – its first manned mission in five years – to expand its space program to compete with the United States.

Shenzhou-12, which means “Divine Vessel,” left the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at around 1:22 a.m. Thursday, according to a live video from CCTV TV.

The shot was fired with a Long March-2F carrier rocket.

The spacecraft carried three male astronauts: Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo.

In the live CCTV video, two of the three astronauts made a “good” hand signal after Shenzhou crossed the Earth’s atmosphere and made a critical separation of the four boosters.

Once in orbit, the spacecraft will “make a rapid encounter and automatic berthing with the core module of the Tianhe orbital space station,” according to CCTV.

The astronauts will be in the basic module and will be in orbit for three months.

China began construction of the space station this year when it launched Tianhe (the first and largest of the station’s three modules) in late April.

Nie comes from central Hubei Province and is a former Air Force pilot leading the mission.

Shenzhou-12 is Nier’s third space launch, after the Shenzhou-6 mission in 2005 and the Shenzhou-10 mission in 2013, according to the Xinhua news agency.

This is Liu’s second mission to space, and the first was the Shenzhou-7 mission in 2008, which featured a landmark space trajectory. This is Tang’s first trip into space.

The mission of the last flight of the Chinese crew was in 2016, when two men – Chen Dong and Jing Haipeng – were sent by the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft to Tiangong-2, a prototype of the space station, where they stayed for about a month.

Beijing’s goal is to make the country a major space power by 2030, making space the newest frontier of competition with the United States.

In May, it became the second country to put a vehicle on Mars, two years after the first spacecraft landed at the far end of the moon.