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)

Boat crew members train on the waters of the Tonle Sap River on the morning of the first day of the Water Festival on November 13, 2016 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The yearly three-day Water Festival is one of the most important holidays in Cambodia and celebrates the end of the rainy season and the start of the rice harvesting. The Festival also coincides with the Tonle Sap river reversing course, which it does twice a year. Approximately 2 million people are expected to attend this year's festival, during which 259 boats and nearly 20,000 oarsmen will participate in the races. After a fatal stampede resulting in the death of some 353 people during the Water Festival in 2010, it has been cancelled four times over the past five years, with weather used as an official excuse. (Photo by Omar Havana/Getty Images)

Workers use a boat to recover supplies from a flooded grain elevator May 4, 2011 in Caruthersville, Missouri. Heavy rains have left the ground saturated, rivers swollen, and has caused widespread flooding in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Arkansas. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Activists protest the Shell Oil Company's drilling rig Polar Pioneer which is parked at Terminal 5 at the Port of Seattle, Washington May 16, 2015. Hundreds of activists in kayaks and small boats fanned out on a Seattle bay on Saturday to protest plans by Royal Dutch Shell to resume oil exploration in the Arctic and keep two of its drilling rigs stored in the city's port. (Photo by Jason Redmond/Reuters)

Rowers enter in Canaregio river during the 42nd Venice Vogalonga on May 15, 2016 in Venice, Italy. 42 years ago a group of Venetians, both amateur and professional rowers, came up with an idea of non-competitive race in which any kind of rowing boat can take part. The first Vogalonga began with the message to protest against the growing use of powerboats in Venice and the swell damage they do to the historic city. (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)

Students stand on the roof of a wooden boat as haze blankets the Musi River while they travel to school in Palembang, on Indonesia's Sumatra island, September 10, 2015. Indonesia is investigating 10 firms over worsening forest fires that have created a blanket of smog over Southeast Asia, threatening them with sanctions if they are found responsible, a government minister said on Tuesday. The thick haze from Indonesia's Sumatra and Kalimantan islands has forced the repeated cancellation of flights in the area and pushed air quality to unhealthy levels in neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia. (Photo by Reuters/Beawiharta)

A fishing boat that was ran aground by the sea while moored in the port of Coquimbo, some 445 km north of Santiago, during the eve's earthquake on September 17, 2015. A million people were evacuated in Chile after an 8.3-magnitude quake struck offshore in the Pacific, killing at least 10 people and triggering tsunami waves along its northern coast. (Photo by Martin Bernetti/AFP Photo)

A man stands next to the body of a migrant child washed up on a beach in Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016 after at least 37 migrants drowned when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece, Turkey's state-run Anatolia news agency reported. The migrants, who included those from Myanmar, Afghanistan and Syria, set sail from the Canakkale province to reach the nearby Greek island of Lesbos, Anatolia said. (Photo by Ozan Kose/AFP Photo)