China To Send First Civilian To Space: CMSA

The nation will send its first civilian into space as part of a crewed mission to the Tiangong space station on Tuesday, the China Manned Space Agency said.

"Payload expert Gui Haichao is a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics," agency spokesperson Lin Xiqiang told reporters on Monday. Until now, all taikonauts sent into space have been part of the People's Liberation Army.

Gui will be "mainly responsible for the on-orbit operation of space science experimental payloads", Lin said.

Lin also pointed out that the taikonauts are expected to make high-level scientific achievements in the study of novel quantum phenomena, high-precision space time-frequency systems, the verification of general relativity, and the origin of life.

The mission commander is Jing Haipeng, and the third crew member is Zhu Yangzhu. Jing will become the country's first taikonaut to go into space for a fourth time, having been involved in the Shenzhou-7 mission in 2008 and commanded the Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-11 crews in 2012 and 2016.

The trio are part of a crew rotation, in the fifth manned mission to the nation’s space outpost since 2021, and are set to take off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China on Tuesday at 9:31am Beijing time, the space agency said.

In addition, the space agency said that more than 10 people from Hong Kong and Macau are being considered in its fourth-batch taikonaut selection.

Lin, meanwhile, announced that Beijing plans to conduct a manned lunar landing by 2030.

He said the manned lunar landing will promote and leapfrog development of manned space technology from near-Earth to deep space, and deepen human understanding of the origin and evolution of the moon and the solar system. (Agencies)

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