The Xinhua news agency said the Tianzhou-1 cargo resupply spacecraft will be launched at 7:41 p.m. (1141 GMT), borne aloft on a Long March-7 Y2 rocket from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre in the southern island province of Hainan.
Join us here for CGTN's live coverage of the launch of Tianzhou-1, China's first cargo spacecraft.
It is the first cargo ship independently developed by China and is expected to dock with the orbiting Tiangong-2 space lab and conduct in-orbit refueling.
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The country has a very ambitious space program, including building its own space station and landing on the crewed mission to the moon, and earlier in the year, it declared a November mission that would return samples from the moon.
Tianzhou-1 is 10.6-meter long and weights 13 ton. There is one capsule each for carrying the cargo and the propellant, and the spacecraft will weigh about 13 tons at liftoff. "The completion of the transfer signals the Tianzhou-1 mission has entered its launching stage", the People's Daily quoted the office's statement as saying.
It is created to dock with the Tiangong 2 space laboratory, or "Heavenly Palace 2", where two astronauts spent a month in space last October in China's longest ever manned space mission. With International Space Station coming out of the service in 2024, China will be the only country having a space station at that time.
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