This Day, That Year

years on

Editor’s note: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.

On June 11, 2013, the Shenzhou X spacecraft, launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province, sent two men and a woman into space.

The item from China Daily featured a photo showing astronauts Wang Yaping, Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang (from left to right), meeting the press at the center the day before the launch. They spent 15 days in space.

It was the China’s fifth manned space mission, and the astronauts performed one automatic and one manual docking test with the orbiting space lab module Tiangong I.

China’s space lab was launched in September 2011.

Space rendezvous and docking are crucial skills for building a space station, a key component of the manned space program which was first approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1992.

On Oct 15, 2003, China carried out its first manned space mission, sending Yang Liwei on a 21-hour series of Earth orbits in Shenzhou V.

China thus became the third nation after Russia and the United States to achieve that feat.

In the 16 years since Yang’s momentous journey, China has evolved from a second-tier player in the global space race into a great power.

China started sending robotic probes to the moon in 2007 and has carried out several lunar missions since then. It landed the Chang’e 3 probe, which carried the first Chinese lunar rover, on the moon in December 2013.

On Jan 2, the Chinese spacecraft Chang’e 4 made a historic landing on the far side of the moon.

Last year marked the first time China had launched more rockets into orbit than any other country in any given year.

China saw 39 orbital launches in 2018, equaling the nation’s total space missions in the 1990s.

The country’s first space station is due to be fully operational around 2022 and is set to operate for at least 10 years, according to the China Manned Space Agency.