China: Chinese Astronauts Return Safely

By JOE McDONALD Associated Press

BEIJING — A space capsule carrying two Chinese astronauts landed by parachute in the country’s northern grasslands before dawn Monday following a five-day mission meant to affirm China’s status as an emerging technological power.

The astronauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng were “in good health” after their Shenzhou 6 capsule touched down at 4:32 a.m. local time in the Inner Mongolia region, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said retrieval crews had reached the landing site and the two men were undergoing a medical checkup.

The two astronauts were shown live on state television climbing out of their kettle-shaped capsule with the help of two technicians in red jumpsuits and climbing down a ladder to the ground. They smiled, waved to cheering members of the retrieval crew, accepted bouquets of flowers and sat in a pair of metal chairs beside the capsule.

Fei and Nie blasted off Wednesday on China’s second manned space mission. It came almost exactly two years after China’s first manned space flight.

China is only the third country to send humans into orbit on its own, after Russia and the United States — a source of tremendous national pride as the communist government tries to cement its status as a rising power and help prepare for a moon landing by 2010 and the eventual creation of a space station. Shenzhou means “divine vessel.”

Chinese leaders including Wu Bangguo, the No. 2 figure in the ruling Communist Party, were shown on television watching the landing from the Beijing control center. Wu declared the flight a success.

Late Sunday, Xinhua said the mission had “accomplished the planned experiments and accumulated valuable technical data” for China’s manned space program.

The craft landed just a half-mile from its target, Xinhua said.

Shenzhou 6 orbited the Earth more than 70 times and traveled more than 1.9 million miles, Xinhua said.

The mission was substantially longer and more complex than the 2003 flight, when astronaut Yang Liwei orbited for 21 1/2 hours before his capsule landed by parachute.

The manned space program is a costly prestige project for China’s communist leaders. They hope to burnish the country’s standing abroad and shore up their own support at home by stirring patriotic pride at a time of widespread frustration over corruption and a growing gap between the country’s rich and poor.

Chinese leaders have defended the program’s expense, saying it will help to drive economic and technological development.

The government says the manned space program has cost a total of $2.3 billion — a fraction of the budget of its American counterpart. The planned length of the flight was not disclosed in advance, nor were details of the astronauts’ mission.

The mission dominated state media last week. In a break with the military-linked space program’s usual secrecy, newspapers and television showed scenes of Fei and Nie working and sometimes playing in orbit.