Chinese taikonauts Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang will carry out the Shenzhou-21 crewed spaceflight mission on Friday, the China Manned Space Agency announced at a press conference on Thursday.
The Shenzhou-21 crewed spaceship is scheduled to be launched at 11:44 p.m. on Friday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.
Click here for CGTN’s livestream of the event.
Zhang Lu, a veteran of the Shenzhou-15 mission, will take the role of mission commander, while Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang, both from the third batch of taikonauts, will be making their first spaceflights. Wu, born in 1993, will become the youngest taikonaut to undertake a flight mission.
Zhang will serve as the space pilot, Wu as the flight engineer and Zhang Hongzhang the payload specialist. They represent the three types of taikonauts currently in service.
Before being selected as a taikonaut, Wu was an engineer at the China Academy of Space Technology under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, and Zhang Hongzhang worked as a researcher at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
