His space agency China announced that the vessel, with a new crew including a civilian for the first time, was successfully launched to the space station on Monday.

So far, all Chinese astronauts sent into space have been members of the People’s Liberation Army. A spokesman for the space agency told reporters that the professor of aeronautics and astronautics would be “primarily responsible for operating the space mission’s experimental payloads.”

Jing Haipeng, on his fourth spaceflight, is commanding Tuesday’s mission, according to Chinese state media. The third crew member is engineer Zhu Zhangzhou. It is recalled that China, which plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030, has invested billions of dollars in its military space program in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Russia.

In the “Sky Palace”, as the space station built in record time by China is called, there is a crew of three, who will be replaced by three taikonauts (as China calls its astronauts), who launched yesterday from the Chinese space center in the Gobi Desert, and they … what -Squeeze with the existing crew on the space station for a while until their colleagues board the ship that will take them back to China.