China officially announced the three astronauts who will blast off Tuesday, June 11, in a Shenzhou 10 spacecraft in an attempt to help the country become a major player in the space race alongside the United States and Russia.
The team will include Nie Haisheng, a Chinese military pilot and astronaut for the China National Space Admnistration (CNSA) who flew as part of the Shenzhou 5 program; Zhang Xiaoguang, a former squadron commander in the People's Liberation Army Air Force and CNSA astronaut since 1998; and Wang Yaping, another air force pilot who will become the second Chinese woman in space after Liu Yang did so in 2012 as part of the Shenzhou 9 mission.
Shenzhou 10 will blast off at 5:38 a.m. EDT from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert.
The Shenzhou 10 spacecraft's mission will be to dock with the Tiangong 1, China's orbiting space module. The Tiangong 1 was also the site of China's first manned space dock rendezvous mission, Shenzhou 9.
Shenzhou 10 will be the last of a three-part series carried out by the Chinese in order to better understand space docking and maneuvering procedures. With the information gleaned, Chinese officials stated that they hope to build and operate their own space station, on par with the 400-metric-ton International Space Station behemoth, by 2020. The space station, the Chinese hope, will help establish China in space technology at a time when the United States is beginning to outsource many of its space operations to the Russians and private sector.
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