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)

A hot air balloon in the shape of children's comic Rupert Bear is seen tethered before a tethered flight at the Bristol International Balloon fiesta in south west England, Britain, August 10, 2018. (Photo by Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian)

The aurora borealis, or the northern lights occur over Derwentwater, near Keswick, England, Thursday October 8, 2015. The northern lights are the result of collisions between gaseous particles in the Earth's atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Wire via AP Photo)

Fish weighing over 80 kilogram is cooked in a hotpot during a food festival in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, October 17, 2015. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is seen on the concourse at Waterloo Station, July 11, 2016, in London. Ghostbusters take over Waterloo Station as Stay Puft Marshmallow Man smashes through the concourse during the morning rush-hour. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

Victor Peralta from Uruguay gestures during the fourth International Tattoo Convention in Quito, September 25, 2016. (Photo by Kevin Granja/Reuters)

A woman walks under snowfall in front of a Soyuz rocket installed as a monument in Baikonur city, near the Russian leased Kazakh Baikonur cosmodrome on December 5, 2021. Space tourists Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano, led by Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, will take part in a mission on the Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) scheduled for December 8, 2021. (Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP Photo)

A Guarani boy pets a puppy in the Mata Verde Bonita village, in Marica, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, Thursday, February 25, 2020, where healthcare workers are making the rounds with coolers containing doses of China's Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine as part of a mass immunization program aimed at inoculating all of Rio's 16 million residents by the end of the year. (Photo by Bruna Prado/AP Photo)