BEIJING — Chinese officials unveiled plans for Monday's launch of the country's latest space mission in which two astronauts will be blasted into space and will dock with an orbiting space lab. The Shenzhou mission will take off aboard a Long March-2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China. The spacecraft will dock with the Tiangong 2 space station within two days and the astronauts will stay there for 30 days to test the complex's ability to support their life. "It is any astronaut's dream and pursuit to be able to perform many space missions," Jing said at a separate briefing. China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, becoming only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so, and has since staged a spacewalk and landed its Yutu rover on the moon.

Source: New York Times October 16, 2016 03:56 UTC