China Enters Space Race
On Sunday, China announced the flight of its first craft capable of carrying a man into space. The mission was headline news in China, where developing a national space program is a matter of national pride.
"China deserves a place in the world in the area of high technology," the official Xinhua news agency quoted the head of China's Manned Spaceflight Program as saying.
"The successful test flight demonstrates that China's spacecraft and new carrier rocket are excellent in performance."
The spacecraft is named Shenzhou--literally, God Ship. State television showed the spacecraft, borne aloft by a Long March rocket, blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the northwestern province of Gansu at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday (2230 GMT Friday).
Xinhua said the return module touched down in the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia at around 3:30 a.m. on Sunday (1930 GMT Saturday).
State television broadcast simulated pictures of the return, showing the module descending by parachute and four braking rockets firing shortly before landing.
Chinese state television said it was the 59th launch of the Long March rocket series and the 17th consecutive successful launch in the past three years.
Xinhua said China would conduct more unmanned test flights before putting astronauts into space, but gave no timetable. Hong Kong's Beijing-backed Wen Wei Po newspaper said a manned launch was "just around the corner."
Aviation journal Flight International said the craft was understood to be based on the Russian Soyuz, but with two pairs of solar panels to generate on-board power and a cylindrical forward module rather than the Soyuz's spherical one. It is believed to have a mass of 8.4 tons and could accommodate up to four astronauts.
Experiments were conducted during the flight on space remote sensing, environmental monitoring, space materials, astronomy and physics.
A new land and sea-based space monitoring and control network was built for the launch, which was the 59th of a Long March rocket and followed a series of technical failures in recent years for the Long March program.
The dome-shaped ship was in space for 21 hours and orbited the earth 14 times, making China only the third nation to launch such a vehicle--after the Soviet Union and the United States.
Beijing has been looking for ways to boost national morale amid slowing economic growth and rising unemployment. Membership in the exclusive space club comes 42 years after the former Soviet Union founded it by launching the satellite Sputnik-1.
Chinese newspapers did not hit the streets until midday on Sunday, apparently delayed until the successful return of the spacecraft. A photograph of the launch and calligraphy by Jiang reading Shenzhou covered the front page of the People's Daily.
China launched its first rocket in 1959, a year after Mao Zedong declared China would develop atomibombs, missiles and satellites. The country has been secretly developing a manned space flight program since 1992.