In a major test of the nation's aspirations to run a permanent space station and transport astronauts to the Moon, China successfully launched its latest rocket and prototype space vehicle, state media reported on Tuesday.
According to Xinhua news agency, the Long March 5B rocket blasted off from the Wenchang launch facility on the southern Hainan island, and an unmanned prototype spaceship successfully separated eight minutes later and entered its planned orbit, Xinhua news said.
China plans to construct a massive space complex to orbit the Earth, with several modules rivaling the size of the International Space Station. Its engineering and research team spent nearly a decade developing the new rocket, making breakthroughs in key technologies, rocket chief designer Li Dong said.
The United States has prohibited any space partnership with China out of national security worries, preventing the latter from joining the ISS and encouraging it to build its own space capability.
China expects to one day deploy astronauts to a space station that it plans to finish by 2022 - and ultimately to the Moon. The station will have a crew strength of six.
As Xinhua said in March, the mission would test the country's "primary technologies," including monitoring its re-entry into the atmosphere, its heat protection and recovery systems, China Academy of Space Technology's Yang Qing, who designed the spacecraft, was quoted as saying by Xinhua in March. The US is the only nation that has successfully sent humans to the Moon so far.
Earlier, China launched an experimental space station which later crashed through the atmosphere. In 2019, the country's booming space industry hit a milestone by landing a spacecraft on the still unexplored far side of the moon, with plans to launch a lander and rover on Mars.
China initiated the manned space undertaking in 1992. Created as the nation's strongest space vehicle, the Long March-5 has a payload of 25 tons to low Earth orbit, or 14 tons to so-called geostationary transfer orbit, an earlier report by Xinhua news revealed.
Ji Qiming of the China Manned Space Agency disclosed in a media briefing that the spaceship and capsule are expected to return to a landing site by Friday after completing their test flights.
Flight mission command headquarters chief Zhang Xueyu said the launch had "strengthened determination and confidence" for the upcoming stages of China's space mission. The next major mission for China is to land a probe on the Red Planet, with blast-off anticipated this year.
