Deng Lei also felt himself boiling over, his heart racing upward with the liquid oxygen venting from the New Yuan-2A.
The New Yuan's lunar mission team was also in the selection process, with Deng Lei as the sole candidate for the commander due to his seniority, although it was not necessarily aboard the New Yuan-2A going to the Moon. However, the mission of the New Yuan-2A represented the official start of New Yuan's lunar program.
This unmanned test launch featured a three-stage configuration; the next step would involve sending a super-large Lunar Space Station weighing 50 tons to the Moon, also with five modules. It could accommodate seven astronauts for 30 days without any issues if they squeezed in a bit.
Next to him was the Russian, Oleg Kononenko, the commander of the Union TMA-17M mission.
After the TMA-17M spacecraft incident, Kononenko took on some administrative responsibilities within the Russian Space Agency, but that did not mean he was done with space.
