China counts down for second manned space trip

By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) – China sends its second manned mission
into orbit from a remote launch site in the dusty northwest on
Wednesday, just two years after joining an elite club of space
powers.

Astronauts Fei Julong and Nie Haisheng had entered the
capsule of the Shenzhou VI after a meeting at the Jiuquan
launch center with Premier Wen Jiabao, who wished their mission
success.

Lift-off for the spacecraft was expected between 8 a.m. and
9 a.m. Beijing time (0000-0100 GMT), carrying two former
fighter pilots into orbit around Earth.

“We have made good preparations for the launch,” Wang
Yongzhi, chief designer for the national space program, told
Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.

“Thorough tests and checkups show all indices meet design
requirements,” he said from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch
Center, deep in the desert of western Gansu province.

“I believe this flight will be successful.”

The launch comes — depending on the weather — just a day
after the Communist Party wrapped up a key meeting to map out
the development of the world’s seventh-largest economy for the
next five years.

It also comes as China opens its 10th National Games,
dubbed its mini-Olympic Games, ahead of the Beijing Olympics in
2008.

“You will once again show that the Chinese people have the
will, confidence and capability to mount scientific peaks
ceaselessly,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted premier
Wen as telling the astronauts.

SERIOUS PLAYER

China is determined to become a serious space player and
set up a National Astronaut Training Center in Beijing this
week, Xinhua said, adding it was only the third such facility
in the world.

Chinese television has been filled with images of
spacecraft and astronauts for the past few days.

China’s first man in space was Colonel Yang Liwei, who
orbited Earth 14 times in the Shenzhou V craft on October 15,
2003.

His return to earth came 39 years to the day that China set
off its first atomic bomb.

China has had a long — if not always successful —
relationship with space travel.

The country invented gunpowder and legend has it that a
Ming dynasty (1368-1644) official named Wan Hu attempted the
world’s first space launch. He strapped himself to a chair with
kites in each hand as 47 servants lit 47 gunpowder-packed
bamboo tubes tied to the seat.

When the smoke had cleared, Wan was apparently found to
have been obliterated. But the dream survived.

(Additional reporting by Judy Hua)