During the night from Wednesday to Thursday (17 June), three Chinese astronauts departed to China's new Tiangong Space Station. The Long March-2F carrier rocket was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert, Inner Mongolia.
The Chinese Shenzhou-12 spacecraft will dock automatically with the Tianhe core module, which was launched in April and serves as a living module. The astronauts will stay there for three months.
It is China's first human-crewed flight since 2016, and in total only the seventh crewed flight since China became the third country in the world to independently take a human into space in 2003.
