China moves closer to human space flight
An unmanned Chinese space capsule today landed safely after orbiting the Earth for a week in what officials said was a step towards a manned flight later this year.
The Shenzhou IV capsule landed as planned on the northern grasslands of China’s Inner Mongolia region, the official Xinhua news agency and state television said.
China’s manned space programme is a key prestige project for the communist government. A successful manned flight would make it only the third country, after Russia and the United States, to put a human in space on its own.
Recovery teams had been deployed across snow-covered northwestern China for the return of the Shenzhou IV, which blasted into space December 30 from a base in the Gobi desert.
“The spaceship landed successfully in the middle part” of Inner Mongolia, Xinhua said. The reports didn’t give any other details or the time of the landing.
Chinese space officials have said the mission was likely to be the final test run of a craft identical to the one planned for manned flight.
Officials said that if no problems were reported, the government planned to send up a manned flight in the second half of 2003.
The Shenzhou IV, whose name means “Sacred Vessel,” carried all the equipment for manned flight, and the mission tested life-support and other systems, scientists said.
