The photo made available by U.S. space firm SpaceX on June 3, 2017 shows the company's Falcon 9 rocket launching at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the United States. (Xinhua)
For the first time, the International Space Station (ISS) houses an experiment independently designed by China.
Space cooperation between the United States and China has been a taboo until now. However, the Chinese commercial science project is on board the orbiting outpost on Monday morning in what could be the forerunner of a larger U.S.-China space cooperation agenda.
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No commercial Chinese payload has ever flown to the ISS before. However, SpaceX made history with its Dragon spacecraft in a resupply mission.
The spacecraft lifted off on the U.S. space firm's Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and was captured by the space station's robotic arm on Monday morning.
Among its almost 2,700-kg supplies to the International Space Station, a 3.5-kg scientific payload designed by the Beijing Institute of Technology will be used to investigate how space radiation and microgravity cause gene mutation.
The project will focus on mutations to genes encoding antibodies, parts of the immune system that identify foreign objects, according to the research team. "The results will answer some very important and fundamental questions on life sciences," Deng Yulin, who leads the Chinese research, told Xinhua.
This is not the first Chinese experiment on the ISS, but "this is the first time an ISS experiment has been independently designed and fabricated in China," Deng said.
NanoRacks, a Houston-based company that offers services for the commercial utilization of the space station, has signed an agreement in 2015 with the Beijing Institute of Technology to fly the first China-designed experiment to the ISS.
Under the agreement, NanoRacks offers the service to deliver the Chinese science project to the U.S. side of the space station and astronauts there will conduct experiments twice using NanoRacks' device in about 20 days. Deng told Xinhua that NanoRacks offered his team "very favorable terms".
