Three astronauts reach China’s ‘heaven palace’

The three astronauts took off from China’s Juiquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert on Thursday (local time) (see video above), and a ‘Long March-2F’ rocket carried their capsule into space.

The commander of the “Shenzhou-18” mission is fighter pilot Ye Guangfu. He is joined by taikonauts Li Cong and Li Guangsu, both completing their first space missions. The team will replace the crew of the Shenzhou-17 mission, which launched to the space station in October, and will remain on the space station for six months.

Crew wants to breed fish in space
Ye and his colleagues want to use their time on the space station for experiments in microgravity and in the field of materials research and space medicine, among other things. According to Xinhua, we will also try to set up an aquarium in the space station and breed fish in zero gravity.

“The taikonauts will not only enjoy the space aquarium, but could also pave the way for their future colleagues to enjoy nutritious home-grown fish in orbit,” the report said.

In 2003, China became the third country to send humans into space, after the Soviet Union and the US in the 1960s. The world’s second-largest economy has invested billions in its space program to catch up with the leading space-faring nations. She took space probes to the moon and Mars.

China wants to build a moon station
The ‘Tiangong’ space station (pictured above), whose name means ‘Heavenly Palace’, was completed in late 2022. The station, which is considerably smaller than the International Space Station (ISS), orbits the Earth at a distance of 400 to 450 kilometers and is intended for a minimum of ten years of use.