China launches shuttle carrying first crew to new space station

The first astronauts for China's new space station blasted off Thursday for the country's longest crewed mission to date, a landmark step in establishing Beijing as a major space power. The high-stakes mission, named Shenzhou 12, was launched on the back of the Long March 2F rocket, which blasted off as scheduled at 9:22am Beijing time (which translates to 6:52am in Indian Standard Time) at Jiuquan in the northwestern Gansu province. The trio launched on a Long March-2F rocket for the Tiangong station, where they will spend three months, in a much-anticipated blast-off broadcast live on state TV.

Among the astronauts in China's space mission, Nie Haisheng has flown to space twice before -- on the Shenzou-6 mission in 2005 and then again on the Shenzhou-10 mission in 2013. The former air force pilot is now the oldest Chinese astronaut to go to space, reported news agency Reuters. Liu Boming flew on the Shenzhou-7 space mission in 2008, while this is the first spaceflight for the other astronaut, Tang Hongbo. The three astronauts are scheduled for a three-month stay aboard the core module of the new space station, which was launched to low Earth orbit on April 28. The three-month stay for Nie, Liu, and Tang will be the longest for any Chinese astronauts, and one focus will be seeing how the men handle their relatively long time in orbit. To prepare for the mission, the crew has undergone more than 6,000 hours of training, including hundreds of underwater somersaults in full space gear.