A Chinese spacecraft carrying a three-person crew, including the country's first female space engineer, has successfully docked after a journey lasting over six hours.

Axar.az reports that , citing BBC, the crew will utilize the homegrown space station as their base for six months, conducting experiments and performing spacewalks as Beijing seeks to gain experience and knowledge for its goal of landing a person on the Moon by 2030.

Beijing has hailed the launch of Shenzhou 19 as a "complete success," marking one of 100 planned launches in a record-setting year for space exploration, as China aims to surpass its competitor, the United States.

The BBC was granted rare access to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu, and we were positioned just over a kilometer away when the spacecraft took off.