First crew to head for China's heavenly space palace

China's space station is to be a ghost town no longer. A crewed space capsule is scheduled to dock with the nation's orbiting Tiangong-1 space lab for the first time next week. Though the feat won't break new technological ground, it will be a major achievement for the superpower that came late to the space race.

"The fact that China is going it alone here is significant," says Roger Launius, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. "It gains critical experience for China in long-duration missions, rendezvous and docking? something it must do to close the gap between it and the other spacefaring nations."

China is preparing to launch its Shenzhou-9 mission on 16 June. A Soyuz-derived crew capsule carrying three taikonauts will launch atop a Long March-2F rocket (pictured) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in north-west China. Two days later, the aim is to dock with Tiangong-1 ("Heavenly Palace") ? a 10-metre long, 3-metre diameter space lab launched in September last year. The crew is expected to include China's first female taikonaut.

The ability to flit crews between Earth and an orbital station will be a "significant step" for China, chief designer Zhou Jianping told China's official news agency, Xinhua. Launius says it's no new technical feat though: "Space stations in orbit go back to the 1970s." Russia orbited Salyut in 1971, NASA lofted Skylab in 1973 and Russia launched Mir in 1986 ? all before construction of the International Space Station began in 1998.

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