China just sent its first civilian astronaut to space

China on Tuesday launched its Shenzhou-16 space mission, which counted the nation's first civilian astronaut among its three-person crew, CNN reported. The astronauts were sent to China's Tiangong space station to take over for the Shenzhou-15 astronauts. This is China's fifth mission to the space station since 2021.

The crew — Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao — will spend five months aboard the space station. Gui, a professor at Beihang University, is the first civilian astronaut to participate in a mission. "China is trying to make sure that in the next two decades, it will have enough well-trained astronauts, both experienced and young, to prepare for even larger missions, such as landing on the moon, and even on Mars," according to Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency.

China's space technology has been rapidly expanding in the past few years. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said that the "space dream is an important part of the dream to make China stronger," per The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. also proposed $4 billion more for the Space Force this year than in previous years to keep up with China's advancement. "Such demonstration of independent space capabilities adds to China's great power status and as a rival alternative space power to the world," Namrata Goswami, an Alabama-based independent scholar on space policy, told the Journal. The rivalry has resulted in a new space race to the moon.

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"China's space program is integrated into its civil-military fusion strategy ... [and it] plans to challenge U.S. dominance on the moon within this framework," Goswami remarked.