JIUQUAN, China—China’s Shenzhou-9 spacecraft blasted off(点火升空)at 6:37 pm Saturday, from a remote desert in western China, sending a crew of three, including the country’s first female astronaut, into space. The successful launch, powered by a Long March 2F rocket, was shown live on state television Saturday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in western China. The Chinese astronauts will complete the country’s first manned space docking mission(载入太空对接任务), an important step in Beijing’s ambitious plan to build a permanent space station by 2020. Possible future missions could include sending a man to the moon. The crew is expected to spend more than 10 days in space and dock with the Tiangong-1 space lab module, which China launched in September 2011. Two of them will live and work inside the module to test its life-support systems, while the third will remain in the capsule to deal with any unexpected emergencies. China first launched a man into space in 2003, followed by a two-man mission in 2005 and a three-man trip in 2008 that featured the country’s first spacewalk. In November 2011, the unmanned Shenzhou-8 successfully docked twice with Tiangong-1 by remote control. The manned docking would be considered a milestone for China’s space program. China is hoping to join the United States and Russia as the only countries to send independently maintained space stations into orbit(轨道). It is already one of just three nations to have launched manned spacecraft on their own. The program is a source of enormous national pride for China, reflecting its rapid economic and technological progress and ambition to rank among the world’s leading nations. 小题1:From the passage, we know that .
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