China to send its first civilian astronaut into space

Payload expert Gui Haichao will depart for the Tiangong space station on Tuesday as part of a three-person mission.

China will send its first civilian astronaut into space on Tuesday as part of a crewed mission to the Tiangong space station, officials said.

Gui Haichao, a payload expert, will lift off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 9:31 a.m. local time (01:31 GMT) on Tuesday, the China Manned Space Agency said Monday.

Until now, all Chinese astronauts sent into space have been members of the People’s Liberation Army.

A spokesman for the space agency told reporters that Gui, who is a professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “will be mainly responsible for the operation of experimental payloads in space science.”

Tuesday’s mission commander is Jing Haipeng — on his fourth trip to space, according to state media — while the third crew member is engineer Zhu Yangzhu.

China, which plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030, has invested billions of dollars in its military-led space program, trying to catch up with the United States and Russia after years of late meeting their milestones.

It completed construction of its third and permanent space station, Tiangong, last year. The last module of the T-shaped Tiangong – whose name means “heavenly palace” – was successfully docked with the core structure in November.

The station contains a number of advanced scientific equipment, the state news agency Xinhua reported, including “the world’s first space-based cold atomic clock system.

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Tiangong is expected to remain in low Earth orbit for at least 10 years at an altitude of between 400 and 450 kilometers (250 and 280 miles) above the planet – realizing the ambition of establishing a long-term human presence in to keep the space.

It will be constantly manned by rotating teams of three astronauts, who will conduct science experiments and help test new technologies.

While China does not intend to use Tiangong for global cooperation on the scale of the International Space Station, Beijing said it is open to foreign cooperation.

It is not yet clear how extensive this cooperation will be.

China has been effectively barred from the International Space Station since 2011, when the United States banned NASA from engaging with the country.