Chinese To Deliver Manned Spaceflight

Plan First Launch In Second Half Of 2003

(CBS)  China said Thursday it plans to launch its first manned spacecraft in the second half of this year.

According to CBS News Reporter Katherine Arms in Hong Kong, China earlier this week successfully launched the Shenzhou IV, the country's fourth and most-sophisticated unmanned capsule.

The director of Shanghai's aerospace bureau, Yuan Jie, said preparations for the manned flight have entered the assembly and testing phase.

"China's Shenzhou V will send a person into space in the latter half of this year," the China News Service, the official government agency, said in a brief dispatch on its Web site. That suggested that the next Shenzhou launch would be the manned flight.

Yuan wasn't available for comment, but an official in his Shanghai office confirmed the report.

"Shenzhou V will be manned," said the official, who was reached by telephone and wouldn't give his name. He said Yuan told Chinese reporters the flight would be a "breakthrough in China's manned aerospace history."

When the manned capsule is launched, China will be the third country in the world to have sent a human into space, following the United States and the former Soviet Union. Astronauts from other nations have been in space, though only by collaborating with either Washington or Moscow.

The current Shenzhou craft, the Shenzhou IV, was orbiting the Earth on Thursday, three days into what is expected to be a seven-day mission. Chinese officials who supervised the launch have been talking for days of an imminent manned space flight by China.

Earlier this week, President Jiang Zemin called for the continuing development of China's space program, saying the latest launch was a "great victory" and implying that manned flights weren't far off.

Jiang encouraged all involved to "redouble their efforts and work in a pioneering spirit to make more contributions to the peaceful development of the outer space," Xinhua said.

His comments reflected the government's enthusiasm about its space program, which it has cast as a symbol of national pride much as the United States did with NASA's Apollo launches during the "space race" of the 1960s against the Soviet Union.

Zhang Qingwei, president of the state-run China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., which manufactured the capsule, was quoted as saying earlier this week that a manned flight was "just around the corner" if no problems were reported during the current Shenzhou flight.

The Shenzhou IV, which blasted off before dawn Monday from a rocket base in the Gobi desert, carried all the equipment for manned flight, the government has said. It says the mission will test life-support and other systems with an eye toward manned missions.

Its flight was the fourth for a Shenzhou capsule — whose name means "Sacred Vessel" — and the second in less than 10 months.

Astronauts picked from the ranks of fighter pilots in China's air force have been training for several years to make the first flights into space.