July 24, 2022

Having moved into China's Tianhe space station core module for more than a month, the Shenzhou-14 crew of three taikonauts are now only hours away from performing their first major missions in orbit, receiving the arrival of the Wentian laboratory module and linking it to the three-module China Space Station.

With the trembling of coconut trees on the coastal line of the South China's tropical island province of Hainan, the giant heavy lift Long March-5B Y3 carrier rocket took off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site at 2:22 pm on Sunday. And after a flight of about eight minutes, the Wentian module separated with the rocket body and entered preset orbit, marking success of the launch mission, the China Manned Space Agency said in a statement it provided to the Global Times Sunday.

Wentian, the first lab module of the country's space station, is expected to carry out a semi-autonomous rendezvous and docking with the space station's Tianhe core cabin in the front port, and in a few hours, the Tianhe space station core module will for the first time receive a new spacecraft while the crew is onboard.

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