On Thursday, three Chinese astronauts lifted off on the Shenzhou-17 spacecraft from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center deep in the Gobi Desert, heading for the Tiangong space station for a six-month stay.
When China’s first astronaut Yang Liwei blasted off into space in 2003, it was a history making moment that declared his country’s arrival as an emerging space power. Two decades on, China has become a major presence in space – a status that mirrors its growing economic, political and military ascendency on Earth. It now has its own permanent outpost in orbit – a fully operational space station – and routinely rotates crews to live and work there.
China’s space ambition Tiangong has become a symbol of China’s ambition and capabilities in space, after Chinese astronauts were shut out of the ISS, a US-led collaboration with Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, for more than two decades. Since 2011, NASA has been effectively banned from cooperating with China, after Congress passed the Wolf Amendment due to espionage-related concerns. That exclusion has at least in part spurred Beijing to build its own space station.
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