Hot on the heels of the recent successes that the Red Planet has achieved, China’s space agency has announced the lofty goal of carrying out 11 launch missions within the next two years and sending a dozen astronauts into space.
Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut and now a member of the National Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), announced the news on Saturday, explaining that the tightly packed aerospace roster was to facilitate the rapid construction of a new Chinese orbital station .
The upcoming missions will include the launch of the space station’s main station into orbit. A laboratory for experiments, a manned spacecraft and eventually 12 astronauts are expected to follow, all of which are planned. Beijing plans to launch its new permanent space station in 2022.
Yang also encouraged Chinese youth to take part in the country’s rapidly expanding space program, which completed its third astronaut recruitment campaign last year, and included a total of 17 men and one woman in the country’s aerospace training program.
This latest recruitment operation was open to civilians, unlike the previous two, in the early 1990s and in 2010, in which only military personnel were taken into account.
China has made great strides in space exploration over the past few years, including its recent Tianwen-1 mission that took an orbit around Mars and recently began radiating images and videos.
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