A Long March 2F rocket carrying three astronauts lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi desert on Sunday morning local time, beginning what Chinese space officials say will be the longest-duration mission yet to the country’s Tiangong space station. The three crew members — mission commander Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying — reached orbit on schedule and docked with the station roughly six and a half hours later.
Lai, who was born and raised in Hong Kong and holds a doctorate in computer forensics, is the first astronaut from the city to fly a mission. State media identified her using both her Cantonese name and the Mandarin transliteration Li Jiaying. Her selection was announced in 2023 as part of a wider recruitment that opened crew slots to scientists and professionals from outside the mainland for the first time.
Once aboard Tiangong, the Shenzhou-23 crew met the three astronauts of Shenzhou-21, who have spent more than 200 days in orbit. After a handover period the Shenzhou-21 team is scheduled to return to Earth later this week, leaving Zhu, Zhang and Lai to operate the station through the end of the year. One member of the new crew — the China Manned Space Agency has not yet said which — will then remain aboard for a second six-month rotation, completing a year-long stay aimed at studying human adaptation to extended weightlessness.
The year-long stay will be China’s first and brings its programme in line with US and Russian missions that have used similar profiles aboard the International Space Station to gather data ahead of crewed deep-space exploration. Tiangong, which has been continuously occupied since late 2022, currently consists of three modules and is scheduled to expand to six by 2028.
The launch took place against the backdrop of a more competitive geopolitical environment for space, with NASA and SpaceX preparing crewed lunar operations under the Artemis programme and Beijing accelerating its own plans for a 2030 crewed Moon landing. The China Manned Space Agency confirmed last week that the next batch of Long March 10 booster tests is on schedule, although the agency did not give an updated date for the first uncrewed lunar lander rehearsal.
Lai’s flight has drawn unusual attention inside Hong Kong, where the city government held a public viewing event at the West Kowloon Cultural District and the Education Bureau distributed lesson plans on the mission to secondary schools. Chief Executive John Lee, who attended the viewing, said the launch represented "a milestone moment" for the city’s integration into the national space programme.