Rare Peek At China's Secret 'Taikonauts'

(AP)  As China celebrated the return of its latest unmanned space capsule from orbit, state television offered a rare glimpse Monday into its secretive astronaut program, showing two men training in simulated weightlessness.

The footage on the national news came during a report on the landing Sunday of the Shenzhou IV capsule after a weeklong flight that officials had said could lead to a manned launch this year.

It was one of the first images ever shown on state television of China's astronauts, dubbed "taikonauts" after the Chinese word for space. Their identities haven't been released.

The footage on both the noon and evening news showed the two men and several Westerners aboard a Russian airplane outfitted to simulate zero gravity. At least two Chinese astronauts have trained in Russia, but the report didn't say when or where the flight took place.

A pair of stuffed toy panda bears floated past the camera as the two men, dressed in coveralls with Chinese flags on the chest, donned space suits in the background.

The broadcast added to signs of China's growing confidence in its effort to become the third nation, after Russia and the United States, able to send its own astronauts into orbit. The program began in 1992 but has released little information, possibly to avoid embarrassment if it suffered technical setbacks.

Communist leaders have invested heavily in the program, which they hope will win them domestic support and respect abroad. A manned flight would serve as proof of the country's technical prowess and progress after two decades of economic reform.

State newspapers Monday carried adulatory coverage of the Shenzhou IV landing late Sunday on the snow-covered northern grasslands of the Inner Mongolia region. Front page photos showed the drum-shaped capsule lying on its side, surrounded by recovery crews bundled up against the subfreezing cold.

The Shenzhou IV blasted into space Dec. 30 from a base in the Gobi desert. The official Xinhua News Agency said it orbited the earth 108 times and performed hundreds of maneuvers, including unfolding its solar panels.

It was the fourth unmanned Shenzhou flight. Official media said the capsule, based on Russia's Soyuz, carried all the equipment necessary for manned flight and tested life-support equipment.

"Completion of the successful voyage starts a countdown for China to realize its ambitions of becoming the third country to put people in orbit," the China Daily newspaper said.

Despite such cheerleading, ordinary Chinese are ambivalent, partly because of the lack of public information. Some criticize the program as a waste of money for a poor country where the average income per person is about $700 a year.

The scenes of astronauts Monday on television could be the start of propaganda aimed at stoking public excitement by lionizing the country's first space travelers. The broadcast showed the faces of the two trainees — an unusual step for state media, whose earlier images of astronauts showed them from behind or with faces obscured.

The two men appeared to be the same pair shown wearing space suits in a photograph posted last week on the Web site of a Chinese space-oriented newspaper.

A corps of about a dozen astronauts picked from among fighter pilots in China's air force have been training for years. According to state media, they used the Shenzhou IV capsule for training, and lived inside it for a week last April.

The newspapers Sing Tao of Hong Kong, China Times of Taiwan and the Chinese news Web site Muzi.com identified the first pilot as Chen Long. The reports cited anonymous Chinese sources.

They said Chen had been chosen from 14 trainee astronauts and described him and an unidentified backup pilot as about 30 years old and of medium height and build.