China Sends Its Youngest Astronaut to the ‘Heavenly Palace’ Space Station

China’s state media reported that the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft and its crew — including the youngest member of China’s astronaut corps — lifted off on Friday atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.

This marks the seventh crewed mission to China’s permanently inhabited space station since its completion in 2022.

The three-member crew of Shenzhou-21 will spend six months aboard the station, continuing China’s gradual transition from veteran astronauts to a new generation of space explorers. Among them are Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu Fei, 32, the youngest astronaut ever sent to space by China. Both were selected for the program in 2020.

First Small Mammals Sent to the Space Station

The Shenzhou-21 astronauts are replacing the Shenzhou-20 crew, who lived and worked aboard Tiangong, or the “Heavenly Palace,” for more than six months and are expected to return to Earth in the coming days.

Joining the new crew are four black mice, the first small mammals ever sent to the Chinese space station. They will be used in low-Earth orbit reproduction experiments.

China’s Shenzhou program now routinely conducts two missions per year. Over the past year, it has achieved several milestones — including the first deployment of astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk, and plans to send Pakistan’s first astronaut to Tiangong next year after joint training.

These rapid advances have raised concern in Washington, which is racing to send U.S. astronauts back to the Moon before China. Both nations are also competing to establish new international frameworks for lunar exploration — the U.S.-led Artemis Accords and the China–Russia-led International Lunar Research Station.