Building on success: Chinese tourists gather to watch the Shenzhou-7 manned spacecraft on top of the Long-March II-F rocket being transferred to the launchpad on September 20, 2008. The launch site is located at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu province.
Credit: AFP
BEIJING: Flushed with success after a widely applauded Beijing Olympics, China will seek this week to further burnish its image with a new chapter in its quest to conquer space.
Long-time Communist Party member Zhai Zhigang is slated to become the nation's first "taikonaut" to walk in space during the Shenzhou VII mission, China's third manned space flight, which is slated to blast off Thursday night.
"When you can undertake manned space flight, you get prestige," said Philippe Coue, French author of several books on China's space program. "If all goes well, especially after the Olympic Games, the nation's image will be even further embellished."
Swift to succeed
In a matter of years, China's military-run space programme has made strides which the United States and Russia took decades to accomplish, and even though the budget is a secret, it is clear it has done so at much smaller cost.
"They have gone very fast, they had the will to undertake manned space flight and they went directly to a sophisticated design capable of carrying three astronauts," Coue said of the three-man Shenzhou mission.
The nation's first spacewalk is part of a series of step-by-step flights which aim to culminate in an orbiting space laboratory over the next several years and then a permanent space station.
China became the third nation after the former Soviet Union and the United States to independently send a man into orbit after Yang Liwei was blasted into space on Shenzhou V in 2003.
To the Moon and Mars
Following Yang's solo flight, two astronauts manned the Shenzhou VI for a five-day flight in 2005.
Forty-two years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, Yang was welcomed home as a hero by the nation of 1.3 billion, where the dream of space flight is as old as the Ming Dynasty (from 1368 to 1644). According to one legend, the Ming official and amateur astronomer Wan Hu tried to construct a crude spaceship – basically a chair with dozens of rockets attached to it – and may not have survived his attempt to enter orbit.
While playing a bigger and bigger role on the world's economic, financial and political stage, China also showed its sporting prowess by dominating the Beijing Olympics. Now it hopes to further its grand vision for outer space.
In the next decade or so China may have circled the moon and be moving towards landing on the lunar surface. Beginning in 2015, it also plans to begin the exploration of Mars.
Some experts believe that outer space will become the new battleground in an emerging rivalry between an increasingly confident China and the United States.
"The Chinese space programme is more a question of affirming its own capabilities than a rivalry. It's the United States that is posing the question of a rivalry," said Isabelle Sourbes-Verger a researcher and expert on China's space program.
