The Chinese word **航天 (hángtiān)**, meaning "spaceflight" or "aerospace," is a compound formed through semantic combination: the first character **航 (háng)** means "to navigate" or "to voyage," and the second character **天 (tiān)** means "sky" or "heaven." Thus, the term literally translates to "sky voyage" or "navigating the heavens," a logical and descriptive construction that emerged in the mid-20th century to describe the modern activity of traveling beyond Earth's atmosphere, paralleling the older term **航空 (hángkōng)**, "aviation," which uses **空 (kōng)** for "air."