A spaceship carrying three astronauts from China's Shenzhou-18 mission safely docked at Tiangong space station Friday, state-run media reported, the latest step in Beijing's space program that aims to send astronauts to the Moon by 2030.

The crew took off in a capsule atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China's northwest at 8:59 pm local time !1259 GMT) Thursday.

By early Friday the spacecraft had "successfully docked" with the space station, state-run news agency Xinhua reported, citing the China Manned Space Agency.

The mission is led by Ye Guangfu, a fighter pilot and astronaut who was previously part of the Shenzhou-13 crew in 2021.

Riding aboard NASA's Psyche spacecraft, the agency's Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration continues to break records. While the asteroid-bound spacecraft doesn't rely on optical communications to send data, the new technology has proven that it's up to the task. After interfacing with the Psyche's radio frequency transmitter, the laser communications demo sent a copy of engineering data from over 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away, 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.