China launches manned space flight with a woman on board

China launched Saturday a manned space flight Shenzhou IX, for his first space rendezvous with astronauts on board, and, another first, with one female astronauts. Liu Yang, a fighter pilot of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) 33 years, will become a hero to more than one billion Chinese people, while leaving the Earth with his two companions Jing Haipeng - which is already been twice in the space - Liu and Wang, aboard the ship to be launched by a Long March rocket. The fourth ship of the Chinese manned space flight to be launched at 6:37 p.m. (10:37 GMT) from the launch pad in Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert (northwest). This first "rendezvous", a delicate operation that requires high technology, is another crucial milestone in the Chinese conquest of space and a source of pride for Beijing which is doubling its space ambitions for reéaliser. The critical moment of the ten-day mission will be a docking manually by the astronauts, contrary to what had happened to Shenzhou VIII, unmanned mission for which the whole operation was controlled from a ground station. Liu Yang, married and childless according to Chinese press, is an experienced pilot who was selected in May 2010 for astronaut training. The excellence of his performance allowed him to be hired in March as a candidate for the Shenzhou IX, told the New China News Agency. "From day one, I was told that I was not different from male astronauts," said Liu CCTV television just after the announcement Friday that it would be the first Chinese to go into space. China will be the third country after the U.S. and the USSR, to send a woman into space with its own technology. The first Chinese manned flight was in October 2003. September 29, 2011, a Long March 2F rocket launched Tiangong-1, the first Chinese space station module. The Shenzhou ("Divine Vessel") VIII in October 2011 had allowed the Chinese to realize for the first time an unmanned docking between two spacecraft orbiting the Earth. Tiangong-1 remained in space after the undocking of Shenzhou VIII and lowered its orbit to get into position to receive Shenzhou IX. For safety, one of the three astronauts remain onboard Shenzhou IX after docking while the other two will take place aboard Tiangong-1. Control of in-space is a crucial step in the conquest of space, crossed by the Russians and Americans in the 1960s. The current program aims to provide within a decade China a space station in which a crew can live independently for several months, as the old Russian space station Mir or the International Space Station (ISS).