A space station carrying China's initial space laboratory, Tiangong-1, has launched from the north of the country.
The Long Mar van carried coherent from the Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert at 21:16 local time (13:16 GMT).
The rocket's climb took the lab out over the Pacific, and on a trail to an circuit a few 350km on top of the Earth.
The 10.5m-long, cylindrical procedure will be unmanned is to time being, but the country's astronauts, or yuhangyuans, are approaching to revisit it next year.
Tiangong means "heavenly palace" in Chinese.
The evident outline is is to procedure to run in an unconstrained mode, monitored from the ground. Then, in a few weeks' time, China will launch other unmanned spacecraft, Shenzhou 8, and try to couple the span together.
This event and advancing ability is a stipulation if incomparable structures are ever to be fabricated in orbit.
"Rendezvous and advancing is a complex technology," mentioned Yang Hong, Tiangong-1's arch designer. "It's moreover necessary to office building China's own space station," he told the state broadcaster China Central Television.
China has betrothed to erect this station at the finish of the decade.
Assuming the Shenzhou 8 project goes well, two manned missions (Shenzhou 9 and 10) should follow in 2012. The yuhangyuans - two or 3 at a time - are approaching to live aboard the conjoined vehicles for up to two weeks.
Tiangong-1 will launch on the ultimate chronicle of a Long Mar 2F rocket
The lab will go in to a 350km-high circuit and will be ignored initially
An unmanned Shenzhou van will after that try to wharf with Tiangong
The orbiting lab will assessment key technologies such as life-support systems
China's settled target is to erect a 60-tonne space station by about 2020
The Tiangong project is the second step in what Beijing authorities explain as a three-step strategy.
The initial step was the growth of the Shenzhou pill network which has so far available 6 nationals to go in to circuit given 2003; then the technologies indispensable for spacewalking and docking, right away in progress; and at last construction of the space station.
At about 60 tonnes in mass, this future station would be extremely not as big than the 400-tonne general stage operated by the US, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan, but its small participation in the sky would yet act for a noteworthy achievement.
Concept drawings explain a core procedure weighing a few 20-22 tonnes, flanked by two somewhat not as big laboratory vessels.
Officials say it would be granted by freighters in precisely the same way that robotic freight ships keep the International Space Station (ISS) currently stocked with fuel, food, water, air, and free parts.
China is investing billions of dollars in its space programme. It has a burly space scholarship bid beneath way, with two orbiting satellites having already been launched to the Moon. A third assignment is approaching to put a corsair on the stellar surface. The Asian nation is moreover deploying its own satellite-navigation network well known as BeiDou, or Compass.
Bigger rockets are coming, too. The Long Mar 5 will be able of putting more than 20 tonnes in a low-Earth orbit. This light muscle, again, will be necessary is to construction of a space station.
"There are loads of ideas buoyant around, and they're major about implementing them," mentioned UK space scientist John Zarnecki, who is a on vacation highbrow at Beihang University, the new name is to Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
"There's a clarity of great optimism. It's not driven so sufficient by science, but by the request to rise new technologies. The allowance is there, although it's not limitless. And they're receiving it step by step," he told BBC News.
Tiangong-1 has a two-year lifetime. It is likely to be followed by a second lab and presumably a third. China says that at the finish of their missions, the modules will be driven in to the sky for a mortal skirmish in to a remote segment of the Pacific Ocean.
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
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