In what marked the beginning of the second step of China’s three-step strategy towards building a 60-tonne space station by around 2020, the country’s first space laboratory - Tiangong-1 – recently lifted off into space aboard a Long March rocket.

The Long March vehicle took off at 21:16 local time (13:16 GMT) from the Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert on Thursday. The Tiangong-1 lab detached from the rocket over the Pacific, and was on its way to an orbit which is apparently distanced nearly 350km from the Earth. The orbiting lab will chiefly test life-support systems and other such key technologies.

As of now, the 10.5m-long, cylindrical module will operate in an autonomous mode, with ground officials to monitor it. However, it is highly likely that China’s astronauts – ‘yuhangyuans’ as they are called – will make a planned visit to the lab in 2012.

To link to the just-launched unmanned Tiangong module, China intends launching another spacecraft - Shenzhou 8 – in the next few weeks; largely to ensure the docking capability of the module --- more so as such a rendezvous and docking capability happen to be the prerequisites for the future assembling of larger structures in orbit.

After Tiangong-1, which in Chinese means ‘Heavenly Palace-1’, completes it two-year lifespan in orbit, it will reportedly be followed by a second, and probably even a third, lab. China has revealed that upon the conclusions of the planned missions, the modules will be driven into the atmosphere and destroyed into a far-flung part of the Pacific Ocean.