Free Republic

Chinese officials unveiled plans for Monday’s launch of the country’s latest space mission in which two astronauts will be blasted into space and will dock with an orbiting space lab. The Shenzhou 11 spacecraft will be launched at 7:30 a.m., said Wu Ping, deputy director of China’s manned space engineering office, in a televised news conference. The Shenzhou mission will take off aboard a Long March-2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China. …

More details about China’s human spaceflight missions are filtering through after the country announced its launch Tiangong-2 and Shenzhou-11 launch schedule for 2016. On Sunday it was announced that the Tiangong-2 space lab will launch in the third quarter of 2016, and be visited by the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft in Q4. Shenzhou-11 will carry two Chinese astronauts, popularly referred to as taikounauts derived from the Chinese ‘taikongren’ (太空人). It has now been stated that two taikonauts will stay in space for 30 days. While this pales into comparison with Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly’s Year in Space, it will be doubling China's...