03:33
Tieng Anh Vui
China's latest manned space mission is about to get under way.
Three astronauts are set to launch on their Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan spaceport at 17:38 Beijing time (09:38 GMT) on Tuesday.
The commander, Nie Haisheng, and his crew, Zhang Xiaoguang and Wang Yaping, plan to spend just under two weeks at the orbiting Tiangong space lab.
Wang is China's second female astronaut and she will beam the country's first lesson from space to students on Earth.
"I will demonstrate some physics experiments in the microgravity environment of space," the 33-year-old said in the crew's pre-launch press conference on Monday.
"We are all students in the face of the Universe and I think we will learn together and have a great time."
This mission is designated Shenzhou-10. The crew's capsule will be ejected from the upper-stage of the rocket about nine minutes after lift-off.
It will then take just over 40 hours to raise its orbit to the operating altitude of Tiangong some 335km (208 miles) above the planet's surface.
Shenzhou-10 is the latest step in China's plan to eventually put a permanently-manned station above the Earth.
Tiangong-1 is the demonstrator. It was launched in 2011 to provide a target to test rendezvous and docking technologies.
The Shenzhou-9 crew - which included China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang - hooked up with the module for nearly 10 days in June 2012.
Nie's team aims to stay a few days' longer, and like Shenzhou-9 will practise both manual and automatic dockings during the mission.
Beijing hopes to launch its fully-fledged station at the turn of the decade.
At about 60 tonnes in mass, this future platform would be only about one-sixth of the size of the International Space Station (ISS) operated by the US, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan, but its mere presence in the sky would be a remarkable achievement.
China still has much to do before it can get itself into that position, however. It needs a bigger rocket for one thing.
The Long March 2F which launches the Shenzhou and Tiangong vessels does not have the capacity to loft the type of modules China would want to incorporate into its station.
The Long March 5 now in development and due to debut in the next couple of years will significantly boost the country's lifting capacity to low-Earth orbit.
Seven nationals have gone into space following Yang Liwei's historic first flight aboard Shenzhou-5 in October 2003.
Commander Nie, a major general in the People's Liberation Army Air Force, has the distinction of becoming only the second two-time Chinese astronaut, after participating in the Shenzhou-6 mission in 2005.
"I feel honoured but I also have a heavy responsibility on my shoulders," the 48-year-old fighter pilot said.
"Compared to Shenzhou-6, this mission will be longer, with more experiments to be conducted, so it will be a new challenge with greater risks."
China's human spaceflight programme is conducted largely in isolation to the ISS partners. But this could change in the next few years.
Europe in particular has opened a dialogue that could eventually result in flight opportunities for its astronauts on the proposed Chinese space station.
"We are looking at possibilities to use this space station," the European Space Agency's human spaceflight director Thomas Reiter told the BBC last month.
"The way ahead is that we will likely see first an exchange of experiments. And there are now also a few colleagues at the European Astronaut Centre who have started Chinese language training."
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