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Chinese rocket launch heats up space race

Elizabeth Gracie
By 篁竹水声 - CC BY 4.0, 

The People’s Republic of China has successfully launched a new rocket to pave the way for the construction of a Chinese controlled space station.

The Long March 5B rocket was launched from China’s Wenchang site on the southern island of Hainan. It carried the spacecraft and its return capsule into space within ten minutes of blast off, as well as China’s dreams to build an orbiting space station to rival that of the ISS.

China says its facility will rival that of the International Space Station (ISS) which currently orbits at an altitude of 400 kilometres and is jointly operated by five major space agencies: USA’s NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, Japan’s JAXA, the EU’s ESA and Canada’s CSA.

This stems from the US banning China’s involvement with the ISS out of national security concerns, severely limiting China’s ability to participate in any space operation with the other four agencies involved with the ISS. 

It is hoped that the spacecraft could carry Chinese astronauts to orbit by 2022, and eventually back to the Moon where China landed an unmanned mission in January 2019 at the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon. 

Construction on the Tiangong Space Station is expected to begin late 2020, with onsite astronauts expected to arrive in 2022 according to the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program.  


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