China could have its first female astronaut this year, after several women were sent to train for manned space docking.

Three astronauts will be on board the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft between June and August this year, to conduct docking with the Tiangong-1 module in Earth orbit, Xinhua quoted an official of China's manned space program as saying.

A group of astronauts, including several women, are training for the docking mission. The three-person crew will be selected from among them at the last minute, said the official, Niu Hongguang.

After Shenzhou 9 and the Tiangong-1 module meet at a rendezvous point in space, the astronauts will temporarily move inside Tiangong-1, where they will conduct scientific experiments. Tiangong-1, China's first space station module, was launched into orbit in September 2011.

The docking mission is the latest development in a program that aims to give China a permanent space station by 2020. The unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft returned to Earth in November 2011, after completing two dockings with Tiangong-1, China's first unmanned docking in space. This was a complex task because the two spacecraft were moving at high speeds in orbit. Mastering docking technology in space is not a simple task that Russia and the United States accomplished in the 1960s.

China sees its space program as a symbol of its global stature and growing technological prowess. The program is aimed at establishing a Chinese space station, where a crew could survive independently for several months, like Russia's Mir or the International Space Station (ISS). China first sent its citizens into space in 2004 and has since conducted several manned space missions.

According to Express