China on Sunday launched the crewed spaceship Shenzhou-14, sending three astronauts to its space station combination for a six-month mission, Xinhua reported.

The trio will cooperate with the ground team to complete the assembly and construction of the Tiangong space station, developing it from a single-module structure into a national space laboratory with three modules—the core module Tianhe and two lab modules Wentian and Mengtian.

The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, was lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 10:44am, according to the China Manned Space Agency.