{"id":692966,"date":"2026-05-25T06:25:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T06:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/692966\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T06:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T06:25:11","slug":"china-launches-shenzhou-23-astronauts-into-space-amid-new-race-to-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/692966\/","title":{"rendered":"China launches Shenzhou-23 astronauts into space amid new race to Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

China has launched three astronauts into space as part of efforts towards its goal of landing a crew on the Moon by 2030.<\/p>\n

The Shenzhou-23 vessel launched at 11:08pm on Sunday, local time, using the Long March-2F Y23 carrier rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in north-west China.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

China’s Shenzhou-23 manned space mission was launched as part of a wider bid to study the long-term impacts of residing in space. (AP: Ng Han Guan)<\/p>\n

Payload specialist Lai Ka-ying, a former Hong Kong police inspector who has a doctoral degree in computer forensics, is the first astronaut from the city to take part in a Chinese space mission.<\/p>\n

The other crew members are commander Zhu Yangzhu and pilot Zhang Zhiyuan, both from the astronaut division of the People’s Liberation Army.<\/p>\n

China launches mission amid US space race to the Moon<\/p>\n

One of the three astronauts will stay on the Tiangong space station for a year, in one of China’s longest space missions ever, but short of the 14-and-a-half-month record set by a Russian cosmonaut in 1995.<\/p>\n

The astronaut would be decided later, depending on the progress of the mission, the China Manned Space Agency said on Saturday.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Astronauts Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Ka-ying, who is the first astronaut from Hong Kong, are on the Shenzhou-23.\u00a0 (Reuters: Maxim Shemetov)<\/p>\n

State media reported the astronaut’s mission was to “explore human adaptability and performance limits” in long-duration spaceflight environments.<\/p>\n

China has sent astronauts to its space station almost a dozen times. However this launch comes amid a new race to the Moon, this time between Beijing and Washington.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The United States has warned about what it alleges are Beijing’s plans to colonise and mine lunar territory and resources.<\/p>\n

Beijing has strongly rejected those claims.<\/p>\n

\"Fiery<\/p>\n

The Shenzhou-23 took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. (AP: Ng Han Guan)<\/p>\n

NASA is seeking to achieve a crewed moon landing in 2028, two years ahead of China. The US aims to establish a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.<\/p>\n

In April, four NASA astronauts made a historic trip<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Chinese<\/p>\n

Children and families gathered at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center to watch the Shenzhou-23 crew take off. (Reuters: Maxim Shemetov)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

China’s Shenzhou missions have been sending trios of astronauts to the station for six-month stays since 2021.<\/p>\n

The Chinese space agency is training two Pakistani astronauts, one of whom could join an expected mission to Tiangong this year on a short-duration basis.<\/p>\n

China human-testing aim for long-term Moon base<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

China has only sent robots to the Moon, but its successive Shenzhou missions have highlighted the country’s rapidly improving space capabilities.<\/p>\n

In June 2024, China used robots to become the first country to recover lunar samples from the Moon’s far side.<\/p>\n

Why did we go back to the Moon, 50 years after Apollo?<\/a><\/p>\n

In both 1968 and 2026, a mission to the Moon offered a refreshing blast of positivity for a conflict-ridden world. So what do we really gain from this new moonshot, five decades after the first?<\/p>\n

A successful crewed landing before 2030 would boost China’s plans to establish, with Russia, a permanent base on the Moon by 2035.<\/p>\n

The Chinese lunar program’s chief scientist, Wu Weiren, has said Beijing’s public timeline is intentionally conservative.<\/p>\n

Over the past year, Beijing has been carrying out safety tests of hardware developed for the 2030 mission, including heavy-lift Long March-10 rockets, the Mengzhou spacecraft and the Lanyue lunar lander.<\/p>\n

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, which hinges on an automated lunar-orbit rendezvous between the Mengzhou capsule and the Lanyue lander.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Beijing is already conducting the world’s first human “artificial embryo” experiment in space, having sent samples of human stem cells to the Shenzhou-22 crew on the Tiangong this month, state media reported.<\/p>\n

The experiment is intended to study the long-term residence, survival and reproduction of human beings in space.<\/p>\n

Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China has launched three astronauts into space as part of efforts towards its goal of landing a crew…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,512,338111,128,226082,285,41991,42593],"class_list":["post-692966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-china","tag-long-march-2f-y23","tag-science","tag-shenzhou-23","tag-space","tag-space-race","tag-the-moon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}