China's Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission
LONDON. KAZINFORM China has launched two men into orbit in a project designed to develop its ability to explore space.
The astronauts took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northern China.
They will dock with the experimental Tiangong 2 space lab and spend 30 days there, the longest stay in space by Chinese astronauts.
This and previous launches are seen as pointers to possible crewed missions to the Moon or Mars.
An earlier Tiangong - or "Heavenly Palace" - space station was decommissioned earlier this year after docking with three rockets.
The astronauts on this latest mission were Jing Haipeng, 49, who has already been in space twice, and 37-year-old Chen Dong.
Their spacecraft, Shenzhou-11, took off from at 07:30 local time on Monday (23:30 GMT), lifted by a Long March-2F rocket.
The astronauts will spend the next month conducting experiments on the Tiangong 2.
China plans to expand the lab over the next few years by sending up additional modules. It is expected to be fully operational by 2022.
China is only the third country - after Russia and the US - to carry out its own crewed space missions.
In 2013 it successfully landed its un-crewed Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, rover on the Moon.
Source: BBC
Photo: CGWIC/Galactic Suite/BMT