A Chinese spacecraft with a three-person crew, including the country’s first female space engineer, has docked after a journey of more than six hours.

The crew will use the homegrown space station as a base for six months to conduct experiments and carry out spacewalks as Beijing gathers experience and intelligence for its eventual mission to put someone on the Moon by 2030.

Beijing declared the launch of Shenzhou 19 a “complete success” – it is one of 100 launches China has planned in a record year of space exploration as it tries to outdo its rival, the United States.

The BBC was given rare access to the Jiuquan Satellite launch centre in Gansu and we were just over a kilometre away when the spacecraft blasted off.

Flames shot out of the rocket launcher as it took to the skies, lighting up the Gobi Desert with a deafening roar.

Hundreds of people lined the streets, waving and cheering the names of the taikonauts, China’s word for astronauts, as they were sent off.

At the Tiangong space station, the Shenzhou 19 crew met with three other astronauts who are manning the Shenzhou 18 and will return to Earth on 4 November.

Just two years ago, President Xi Jinping declared that “to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream”.

But some in Washington see the country’s ambition and fast-paced progress as a real threat.

Earlier this year, Nasa chief Bill Nelson said the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to the Moon, where he fears Beijing wants to stake territorial claims.

He told legislators that he believed their civilian space programme was also a military programme.

However, in Dongfeng Space City, a town built to support the launch site, China’s space programme is celebrated.

Every street light is adorned with the national flag.

Cartoon-like astronaut figurines and sculptures sit in the centre of children’s parks and plastic rockets are a centrepiece on most traffic roundabouts.

A huge poster with Xi Jinping on one side and a photo of the Shenzhou spacecraft on the other greets you as you drive into the main compound.

Hundreds have gathered in the dark after midnight to wave flags and brightly coloured lights as the Taikonauts make their last few steps on Earth before heading to the launch site.

The brass band strikes up Ode to the Motherland as young children, kept up late for the occasion, their cheeks adorned with the Chinese flag, all shout in full song.

This is a moment of national pride.

The pilot of this mission, Cai Xuzhe, is a veteran but he’s travelling with a new generation of Chinese-trained taikonauts born in 1990 – including China’s first female space engineer, Wang Haoze.

“Their youthful energy has made me feel younger and even more confident,” he told the gathered media ahead of take-off.

“Inspired by dreams that spark glory, and by glory that ignites new dreams, we assure the party and the people that we will stay true to our mission, with our hearts and minds fully devoted. We will strive to achieve new accomplishments in China’s crewed space programme.”

Standing to his left, beaming, is Song Lingdong.

He recalls watching one of China’s first space station missions as a 13-year-old with “excitement and awe”. He chose to become a pilot in the hope that this is how he could serve his country.

All three convey their deep sense of national pride, and state media has emphasised that this will be its “youngest crew” to date.

The message is clear: this is a new generation of space travellers and an investment in the country’s future.

China has already selected its next group of astronauts and they will train for potential lunar missions as well as to crew the space station.

“I am determined not to let down the trust placed in me,” says Mr Song. “I will strive to make our country’s name shine once again in space.”

China’s name has been “shining brightly” a lot lately when it comes to headlines about its space programme.

Earlier this year, the country achieved a historic first by retrieving rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon.

In 2021, China safely landed a spacecraft on Mars and released its Zhurong rover – becoming just the second nation to do so.

China also has a fleet of satellites in space and has plans for many more.

In August it launched the first 18 of what it hopes will eventually be a constellation of 14,000 satellites providing broadband internet coverage from space, which it hopes will one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink.

Elon Musk, Starlink’s chief executive, admitted on his own platform X that China’s space programme is far more advanced than people realise.

But others in the US are voicing even greater concerns, as they fear this technology can be weaponised.

The head of US Space Command, General Stephen Whiting, told a space symposium in April that China and Russia were both investing heavily in space at a “breath-taking speed”.

He claimed that since 2018, China has tripled the amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites it has in orbit, building a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and target United States and allied military capabilities”.

China’s space exploration is a “collective mission for humanity”, says Li Yingliang, director of the general technology bureau of China’s Manned Space Agency, dismissing US concerns as “unnecessary”.

“I don’t think this should be called a competition… China has long upheld the notion of peaceful use of space in its manned space programme. In the future, we will further develop international co-operation in various aspects of manned space technology, all based on sharing and collaboration,” he adds.

But the new space race is no longer about getting to the Moon. It’s about who will control its resources.

The Moon contains minerals, including rare earths, metals like iron and titanium – and helium too, which is used in everything from superconductors to medical equipment.

Estimates for the value of all this vary wildly, from billions to quadrillions. So it’s easy to see why some see the Moon as a place to make lots of money. However, it’s also important to note that this would be a very long-term investment – and the tech needed to extract and return these lunar resources is some way off, writes the BBC’s science editor Rebecca Morelle.

Chinese experts at the launch centre were keen to point out the benefits of Beijing’s space station experiments.

“We study bones, muscles, nerve cells, and the effects of microgravity on them. Through this research, we’ve discovered that osteoporosis on Earth is actually similar to bone loss in space. If we can uncover unique patterns in space, we might be able to develop special medications to counteract bone loss and muscle atrophy,” said Zhang Wei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Many of these experimental results can be applied on Earth.”

China is, at times, trying to downplay its advances.

At the launch of a roadmap for its space ambitions, which include building a research station on the Moon, returning samples of Venus’s atmosphere to Earth and launching more than 30 space missions by the middle of this century, Ding Chibiao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the country did not have a great number of achievements “compared to developed nations”.

And even here at the launch centre, they admit to “significant challenges” as they try to land a crew on the Moon.

“The technology is complex, there’s a tight schedule, and there are a lot of challenges,” said Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency.

“We’ll keep up the spirit of ‘two bombs and one star’. We will maintain our self-confidence and commitment to self-improvement, keep working together and keep pushing forward. We’ll make the Chinese people’s dream of landing on the Moon a reality in the near future.”

That’s perhaps why President Xi appears to be prioritising the country’s space programme even as the economy is in a slow decline.

And even though they are bringing along international press to witness their progress – there are key restrictions.

We were kept in a hotel three hours from the launch site and transported back and forth by bus, a total journey of 12 hours, rather than being left on site for a few hours.

A simple trip to a friendly local restaurant was carefully guarded by a line of security personnel.

We also noticed a large sign in town holds a stern warning: “It’s a crime to leak secrets. It’s an honour to keep secrets. You’ll be jailed if you leak secrets. You’ll be happy if you keep secrets. You’ll be shot if you sell secrets.”

China is taking no chances with its new technology, as its rivalry with the United States is no longer just here on Earth.

The world’s two most powerful countries could soon be staking territorial claims well beyond this planet.

The area of land surface affected by drought has trebled since the 1980s, a new report into the effects of climate change has revealed.

Forty-eight per cent of the Earth’s land surface had at least one month of extreme drought last year, according to analysis by the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change – up from an average of 15% during the 1980s.

Almost a third of the world – 30% – experienced extreme drought for three months or longer in 2023. In the 1980s, the average was 5%.

The new study offers some of the most up-to-date global data on drought, marking just how fast it is accelerating.

The threshold for extreme drought is reached after six months of very low rainfall or very high levels of evaporation from plants and soil – or both.

It poses an immediate risk to water and sanitation, food security and public health, and can affect energy supplies, transportation networks and the economy.

The causes of individual droughts are complicated, because there are lots of different factors that affect the availability of water, from natural weather events to the way humans use land.

But climate change is shifting global rainfall patterns, making some regions more prone to drought.

The increase in drought has been particularly severe in South America, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

In South America’s Amazon, drought is threatening to change weather patterns.

It kills trees that have a role to play in stimulating rainclouds to form, which disrupts delicately balanced rainfall cycles – creating a feedback loop leading to further drought.

Yet, at the same time as large sections of the land mass have been drying out, extreme rainfall has also increased.

In the past 10 years, 61% of the world saw an increase in extreme rainfall, when compared with a baseline average from 1961-1990.

The link between droughts, floods and global warming is complex. Hot weather increases the evaporation of water from soil which makes periods when there is no rain even drier.

But climate change is also changing rainfall patterns. As the oceans warm, more water evaporates into the air. The air is warming too, which means it can hold more moisture. When that moisture moves over land or converges into a storm, it leads to more intense rain.

The Lancet Countdown report found the health impacts of climate change were reaching record-breaking levels.

Drought exposed 151 million more people to food insecurity last year, compared with the 1990s, which has contributed to malnutrition. Heat-related deaths for over 65s also increased by 167% compared to the 1990s.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures and more rain are causing an increase in mosquito-related viruses. Cases of dengue fever are at an all-time high and dengue, malaria and West Nile virus have spread to places they were never found before.

An increase in dust storms has left millions more people exposed to dangerous air pollution.

“The climate is changing fast,” says Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown.

“It is changing to conditions that we are not used to and that we did not design our systems to work around.”

For the series Life at 50 degrees, BBC World Service visited some of the hottest parts of the world, where demand for water was already high. We found that extreme drought and rainfall had further squeezed access to water.

Since 2020, an extreme and exceptional agricultural drought has gripped northeast Syria and parts of Iraq.

In the past few years, Hasakah, a city of one million people, has run out of clean water.

“Twenty years ago, water used to flow into the Khabor River but this river has been dried for many years because there is no rain,” says Osman Gaddo, the Head of Water Testing, Hasakah City Water Board. “People have no access to fresh water.”

When they can’t get water, people make their own wells by digging into the ground but the groundwater can be polluted, making people ill.

The drinking water in Hasakah comes from a system of wells 25 kilometres away, but these are also drying and the fuel needed to extract water is in short supply.

Clothes go unwashed and families can’t bathe their children properly, meaning skin diseases and diarrhoea are widespread.

“People are ready to kill their neighbour for water,” one resident tells the BBC. “People are going thirsty every day.”

In South Sudan, 77% of the country had at least one month of drought last year and half the country was in extreme drought for at least six months. At the same time, more than 700,000 people have been affected by flooding.

“Things are deteriorating,” says village elder, Nyakuma. “When we go in the water, we get sick. And the food we eat isn’t nutritious enough”.

Nyakuma has caught malaria twice in a matter of months.

Her family lost their entire cattle herd after flooding last year and now survive on government aid along with anything they can forage.

“Eating this is like eating mud,” says Sunday, Nyakuma’s husband, as he searches floodwater for the roots of waterlillies.

During a drought, rivers and lakes dry up and the soil gets scorched, meaning it hardens and loses plant cover. If heavy rain follows, water cannot soak into the ground and instead runs off, causing flash flooding.

“Plants can adapt to extreme drought, to an extent anyway, but flooding really disrupts their physiology,” adds Romanello. “It is really bad for food security and the agricultural sector.”

Unless we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and stop the global temperature from rising further, we can expect more drought and more intense rain. 2023 was the hottest year on record.

“At the moment, we are still in a position to just about adapt to the changes in the climate. But it is going to get to a point where we will reach the limit of our capacity. Then we will see a lot of unavoidable impacts,” says Romanello.

“The higher we allow the global temperature to go, the worse things are going to be”.