China<\/a> has rushed to launch an uncrewed spacecraft to relieve three astronauts left on board the Tiangong space station without a passage to Earth.<\/p>\nState broadcaster CCTV showed a Long March-2F rocket carrying the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft lifting off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre shortly after noon local time (04:00 GMT) on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
The Shenzhou-22 mission was originally planned to be crewed and take off in 2026.<\/p>\n
However, the launch was brought forward after debris damaged the Shenzhou-20, which is currently attached to the Tiangong station, making it unsafe for carrying humans to Earth.<\/p>\n
That disrupted the last crew change on the permanently crewed Chinese space station in November.<\/p>\n
Unable to fly home in Shenzhou-20, the three taikonauts \u2013 as Chinese astronauts are known \u2013 who had arrived in April for their six-month stay were forced to use Shenzhou-21 to return to Earth.<\/p>\n
That left the three astronauts currently on board Tiangong without a flightworthy vessel that could return them home in the event of an emergency.<\/p>\n
The uncrewed Shenzhou-22 will fill that gap.<\/p>\n
The crew at the space station \u2013 Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang \u2013 are \u201cworking normally\u201d, Chinese officials emphasised.<\/p>\n
The incident marks a rare setback for China\u2019s rapidly growing space programme, which plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2030.<\/p>\n
Beijing has poured billions into the sector in recent decades as it seeks to match the capabilities of the United States, Russia and Europe.<\/p>\n
China became the third country to send humans into orbit after the US and the former Soviet Union in 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beijing carries out emergency launch to relieve space station crew left without working return capsule. Published On 25…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[6109,49,48,95,3456,44,6639,66,8143,306,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-305831","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-asia-pacific","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-china","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-russia","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-science-and-technology","17":"tag-space","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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