China on May 24, 2026, launched its Shenzhou-23 mission with astronauts who will spend one year in orbit for the first time, as the country targets a full moon landing by 2030. A video from state broadcaster, CCTV showed the Long March 2-F rocket blasted off in a cloud of flames and smoke at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan launch centre in China’s northwestern Gobi Desert.
According to the Chinese Space Agency (CMSA) said the spacecraft separated from the rocket around 10 minutes later and entered orbit.
“The astronauts are in good condition, and the launch has been a complete success,” the agency said. Astronauts Zhu Yangzhu, Zhang Zhiyuan, and Lai Kaying were seen waving during a ceremony before taking part in the Shenzhou-23 spaceflight mission to China’s Tiangong space station at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, near Jiuquan, Gansu province.
Payload specialist and former Hong Kong police inspector, Li Jiaying, will be the first astronaut from the city to take part in a Chinese space mission. The other crew members are commander Zhu Yangzhu and pilot Zhang Yuanzhi, both from the People’s Liberation Army’s astronaut division.
One of the three is to stay on the Tiangong space station for a year, one of the longest space missions ever, but short of the 14-1/2 month record set by a Russian cosmonaut in 1995. That astronaut will be decided later, depending on the progress of the mission, the China Manned Space Agency said on Saturday.
China has sent astronauts to its space station almost a dozen times, but the latest launch came amid an accelerating race to the moon with the United States, which has warned about what it alleged are Beijing’s plans to colonise and mine lunar territory and resources, claims the Chinese government has strongly rejected.
NASA is seeking to achieve a crewed moon landing in 2028, two years ahead of China. The US aims to establish a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
In April, four NASA astronauts made a historic trip around the moon as part of the Artemis II mission, flying farther from Earth than anyone before in the world’s first crewed lunar mission in half a century. Elon Musk’s SpaceX made a largely successful, uncrewed test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket last Friday, with the purpose of enabling more frequent Starlink satellite launches and to send future NASA missions to the moon.
China, with less than four years until its 2030 deadline, faces a tall order of developing entirely new hardware and software specific to its lunar mission, proving it is missionready. That will ensure its astronauts, used to the relative safety of Tiangong in low-Earth orbit, can safely make the riskier transition to the moon’s surface.
China’s Shenzhou missions have been sending trios of astronauts to the station for six-month stays since 2021. The Chinese space agency is training two Pakistani astronauts, one of whom could join an expected mission to Tiangong this year on a short-duration basis.
The previous mission, Shenzhou-22, was launched ahead of schedule in November to return three Chinese astronauts to Earth after their Shenzhou-20 vessel was damaged by space debris in orbit. China has only sent robots to the moon, but its successive Shenzhou missions highlight the country’s rapidly improving space capabilities.
