The ongoing online applications for science and technology experiments to be conducted onboard the China Space Station will run until Aug. 31, Science and Technology Daily reported on August 15.

In early June, the China Manned Space Agency announced the first batch of nine international cooperation projects involving 23 entities from 17 countries.

Domestically, research institutions, universities, science and technology enterprises, and even the public are welcome to suggest experiments to be conducted on the space station through an online portal.

China expects to build the space station into a national space lab. In the future, applications will be reopened every two or three years, said Zhang Wei, director of the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been in use for almost 20 years, during which time over 2,000 space experiments in life science, material, combustion and human study have been conducted in microgravity, yielding fruitful results, Zhang said.

Many experimental results are changing lives, such as the degradable microencapsulation for cancer therapy and NeuroArm for brain tumor surgery, Zhang noted.

Compared with the ISS, China’s space station, equipped with more than 10 sealed cabins for experiments, is more advanced in terms of key technical indexes. Thousands of scientific tests can be conducted here in batches, Zhang said.

On top of scientific research, China’s space projects will also serve the popularization of science. Ideas from university and middle schools students are likely to be chosen and practiced at the space station, said the director.