U.S. and China has entered new space race with Artemis lunar rocket launch.

China has successfully sent a new team of astronauts to its Tiangong space station. This is a significant achievement that not only marks the country’s first in-orbit crew handover but possibly also the beginning of continuous occupancy at the station.

The rendezvous in space marks a milestone for China’s rapidly advancing space program as Beijing aims to catch up with and eventually surpass the United States as the dominant power in space.

The three-man crew arrived at the space station Wednesday aboard a Shenzhou-15 spacecraft to take over from three colleagues who had arrived in June and are set to return next week.

The new team will stay for six months and focus on installing equipment around the newly completed, three-module station, which will host a variety of experiments in near-zero gravity and become only the second permanently inhabited space outpost after the NASA-led International Space Station.

The Tiangong station is set to operate for about a decade in low-Earth orbit, while the ISS is expected to conclude operations by 2030.

Tiangong Chinese: 天宮 Tiāngōng; lit. 'Palace in the Sky'officially the Tiangong space station (Chinese: 天宫空间站; pinyin: Tiāngōng kōngjiānzhàn), is a space station constructed by China and operated by China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) in low Earth orbit between 340 and 450 km (210 and 280 mi) above the surface. Being China's first long-term space station and the core of the "Third Step" of the China Manned Space Program, it has a mass between 90 and 100 t (200,000 and 220,000 lb), roughly one-fifth the mass of the International Space Station and about the size of the decommissioned Russian Mir space station.

The construction of the station is based on the experience gained from its precursors, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 The first module, the Tianhe ("Harmony of the Heavens") core module, was launched on 29 April 2021,[ followed by multiple crewed and uncrewed missions and two more laboratory cabin modules Wentian ("Quest for the Heavens") launched on 24 July 2022 and Mengtian ("Dreaming of the Heavens") launched on 31 October 2022.The research conducted on the station aims to improve researchers' ability to conduct science experiments in space.

Author: Saikat Bhattacharya