At last China re-affirmed its target of building a full-fledged space station by 2020 on Sunday, following a successful manual docking between a manned spacecraft and an experimental orbiting lab module.
Wu 2Ping, the spokesman for China's manned space program, said at a press conference following the docking exercise.
"Mastery of rendezvous and docking technology is a decisive step towards realizing the goals of the second stage in the development of China's manned space flight program. It also lays a firm foundation for the further construction of a space station,"
The Shenzhou 9 and its three-person crew, including the country's first woman in space, Liu Yang, separated about 400 meters from the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace) 1 module for about two minutes before re-connecting under the manual control of the astronauts, with state television covering the event live.
"It means China has completely grasped space rendezvous and docking technologies and the country is fully capable of transporting humans and cargo to an orbiter in space, which is essential for building a space station in 2020," the official Xinhua news agency said on its website.
Wu said successive step for the program would be additional manned docking exercises using the Shenzhou ten, however she said the program had not nevertheless settled on a timeline for successive launch.
The Shenzhou nine had already conducted an automatic docking with Tiangong one, on June 18, daily once it blasted far from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
"The automated docking and manual docking are each essential and that they function a backup for every alternative," Xinhua reported Zhou Jianping, designer-in-chief of China's manned area program, as saying.
Compared with an automatic docking, manual docking is tougher in terms of orbit management, Xie Jianfeng, an area scientist with the Beijing Aerospace management Center, told Xinhua on Saturday.