JIUQUAN, China (AP) — China launched a new three-person crew to its orbiting space station early Wednesday as the country seeks to expand its exploration of outer space.
The team of two men and one woman traveling on the Shenzhou-19 spaceship will replace the astronauts who have lived on the Tiangong space station for the last six months. They are expected to stay until April or May of next year.
The new mission commander, Cai Xuzhe, went to space in the Shenzhou-14 mission in 2022, while the other two, Song Lingdong and Wang Haoze, are first-time space travelers, born in the 1990s.
Song was an air force pilot and Wang an engineer with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Wang will be the crew’s payload specialist and the third Chinese woman aboard a crewed mission.
The Shenzhou-19 spaceship carrying the trio blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 4:27 a.m. local time atop a Long March-2F rocket, the backbone of China’s crewed space missions.
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