China moves a step closer to a manned space mission
Paul Hoversten
Test is success as ship returns after 14 orbits
USA TODAY November 22, 1999, China is on the verge of joining the USA and Russia, which up to now have been the only nations capable of putting humans into space.
China announced Sunday it had launched and recovered an unmanned test spacecraft in a breakthrough mission that could mean a manned flight as early as next year."They're doing their homework, as they should. I'd assume they'll do one more flight test in December and then probably in the first half of next year do the manned flight," says Charles Vick, an expert on China's program at the Federation of American Scientists.
That would fulfill a long-standing dream for Communist China, which marked a half-century of party rule in October. China launched its first rocket in 1959 and orbited its first satellite in 1970.
"Most nations in the world that are economically capable of doing so have gotten into manned spaceflight . . . to drive their national economy," Vick says. "You've got all of South Asia going through a strategic-arms as well as a space race. For China, space is a priority, though not higher than strategic rockets."
China's manned space program, known as Project 921, has borrowed heavily from Russia's program, including the training of two Chinese crewmen at the Star City cosmonaut base outside Moscow.
The weekend flight involved a bell-shaped capsule similar to Russia's 1960s-era Soyuz spacecraft, but believed to be Chinese-made. It was launched early Saturday atop a Long March rocket from Jiuquan in northwest Gansu province.
Called Shenzhou, or "God ship," the unmanned capsule was in space for 21 hours and orbited Earth 14 times. It used braking rockets and a parachute to land as planned in central Inner Mongolia.
A new land- and sea-based space monitoring and control network was built for the launch, which was the 59th of the Long March rocket and came after a series of technical failures in recent years.
Sunday's breakthrough followed a long official silence. In a rare report last month, Beijing newspapers quoted a senior executive of the government-run China Aerospace Industrial Co. as saying the launch of a manned mission was set for the end of this year or early next year. "I would expect there will be at least two flight tests and they'd be better off with three," Vick says. "For them to jump immediately to manned flight would be extremely foolhardy. You always run unmanned tests because something's always going to go wrong, and it's better to catch it before you put a crew aboard."
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
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