Kenya Wildlife Service and Save The Elephants staff push an elephant as they undertake the collaring of ten elephants ranging near the Standard Gauge Railway to fit them with advanced satellite radio tracking collars in Tsavo National Park, Kenya March 15, 2016. (Photo by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

An H-2A rocket carrying Japan's fourth and final quasi-zenith satellite, the Michibiki No. 4, lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan in this photo taken by Kyodo on October 10, 2017. (Photo by Reuters/Kyodo News)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP Photo)

This artist's rendering illustrates the evaporation of HD 189733b's atmosphere in response to a powerful eruption from its host star. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope detected the escaping gases and NASA's Swift satellite caught the stellar flare. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, Expedition 40 flight engineer, attired in a Russian Orlan spacesuit, participates in a session of extravehicular activity (EVA) in support of science and maintenance on the International Space Station on August 18, 2014. During the five-hour, 11-minute spacewalk, Skvortsov and cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev (out of frame) deployed a small science satellite, retrieved and installed experiment packages and inspected components on the exterior of the orbital laboratory. (Photo by NASA)

China has sent its first woman into space on a mission to dock with an orbiting station, the latest step in an ambitious programme to go to the moon and on to Mars.

Photo: China's first female astronaut Liu Yang, waves during a sending off ceremony before she departs for the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft rocket launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, China, Saturday, June 16, 2012. China will send its first woman and two other astronauts into space Saturday to work on a temporary space station for about a week, in a key step toward becoming only the third nation to set up a permanent base in orbit. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)