China offers rare look at its emerging space program

The unmanned Shenzhou spent 21 hours in orbit after liftoff from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center

BEIJING, China (AP) -- China lifted some of the secrecy shrouding its ambitions in space on Wednesday, releasing a policy paper that calls for boosting commercial launch services with more powerful rockets and putting a man in orbit by the decade's end.

The policy paper, the first official overview of China's emerging space program ever released to the public, serves as a chance for Beijing to tout its achievements since launching its first satellite in 1970.

It also reaffirmed the importance that China places on its space program, both as a prestige booster and to help it catch up with international technology.

"China has made eye-catching achievements, and now ranks among the world's most advanced countries in some important fields of space technology," said the paper, carried by the government's Xinhua News Agency.

The paper boasted about China's Long March family of rockets, pointing to the 27 foreign-made satellites that it has carried into space since the program began in 1985.

It said China planned to grab a larger slice of the competitive global market for commercial launches by developing a new series of cheaper and stronger rockets by 2010.

Beijing has largely kept quiet about its space program, which has close ties to the military.

So secretive has China been that it delayed announcing its first and only test-launch of the capsule planned for manned spaceflight until after the unmanned Shenzhou, or "sacred vessel," safely dropped down in Inner Mongolia a year ago this week.

Despite Beijing's high hopes for manned spaceflight, Wednesday's policy paper offered few details on its future, other than to call it a goal to be met in this decade.

The paper made no mention of the money spent on the program, nor did it detail the dozens of research institutes that foreign experts say are involved.

The paper did say that astronauts -- dubbed taikonauts after the Chinese word for space -- have already been selected, and it called Shenzhou's launch last year "a breakthrough in the basic technologies of manned spacecraft."

Sketchy reports in state media have previously let slip that a second test-flight could come by year's end and that a crew of Chinese astronauts went to Russia for training.

If successful, the manned space program -- given the secret designation Project 921 -- would make China only the third nation to put a human in orbit.

"Manned spaceflight is a big deal for the Chinese," said James Oberg, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. space shuttle program who now works as an independent consultant. "It would prove things to themselves and the world, that they've crossed a threshold that only the Americans and Russians have crossed."

China still has significant obstacles to overcome.

The policy paper made no mention of difficulties in building a global tracking network needed to support such a flight.

China has ground-based stations within its own borders, but has had to cover blind spots by dispatching three ships to track spacecraft.

Last month, China signed an agreement with the African nation of Namibia to build a tracking station there -- the point on Earth exactly below where Shenzhou would start its fiery re-entry, Oberg and Namibian media reported.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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