Update : Liftoff ! China ’s Long March 2F Eruca sativa successfully launched with the Tiangong 2 ballistic capsule on board at 10.04am EDT ( 3.04pm BST ) today . Our original account is below .
Today at 10.04am EDT ( 3.04pm BST ) , China is going to be launching its second experimental place station , further proof of the Carry Amelia Moore Nation ’s commitment to its space program .
The launching is taking place from the Jiuquan launch center in the Gobi Desert . Called Tiangong 2 , which render as “ celestial palace ” , the orbital laboratory is 34 pes ( 10 meter ) long and weighs 7.7 metric ton ( 8.5 US tons ) , according toArs Technica .
The launch may be teem live on-line atthis data link , although we ’re not wholly sure if it will be or not yet .
This is China ’s 2d laboratory to be set up to space , following Tiangong 1 in 2011 . Tiangong 2 is just a exclusive module , unlike the ISS that is made of multiple modules bring together together , so it wo n’t be specially big . But it ’s understood that China is using these tests to cook to build a much larger place in the 2020s , which will be about one - seventh the size of the ISS .
Today ’s launch will see a Long March 2F arugula take the laboratory to an eye socket 380 kilometers ( 236 miles ) above Earth . The module will initially be remote-controlled , with two astronauts ( screw as “ taikonauts ” in China ) set to set in motion in October aboard the Shenzhou-11 space vehicle and stay aboard for 30 days , when the station will be raised to 393 kilometer ( 244 miles ) . China ’s first ever lading spaceship , Tianzhou-1 ( “ heavenly vessel ” ) , will later resupply the lab in April 2017 .
consort to China’sXinhua News Agency , experiments related to medicinal drug , physic , and biology will be conducted on the station , which includes affair like quantum central transmission , distance atomic clocks , and solar storm inquiry .
China has been forced to go it alone with its place program , as the US continues to keep in placecontroversial rulesthat prevent NASA working with its Chinese counterpart , the Chinese National Space Agency ( CNSA ) . As a result , rather than working together , like the US does with Russia on the ISS , China has been busy developing its own main space program over the last decade , and it ’s proved rather successful .
It is only the third nation , after the US and Russia , to send human beings to space . In 2013 , it also follow those two again in performing an remote-controlled landing on the Moon . And just last month , it launched aquantum communications satellite , the first ever test of this newcomer engineering science in space .
