China's One Experienced Spaceman Will Sit This One Out

"I won't go on the Shenzhou VI mission," Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei told the Chinese press in Nanjing on Saturday.

Yang (above, shown during 2003 flight) says he is involved in the selection process. There are 13 astronauts -- "Taikonauts" in Mandarin -- vying for the flight.

The next mission should launch in mid-October. According to Chinese press reports, the flight is scheduled to launch atop a Long March 2F booster from Jiuquan in Gansu province in Northwestern China. Those details are the same as Yang's 2003 orbital flight.

What is different about the Shenzhou VI mission is that it will carry two astronauts. Taking a leaf from Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites book, the Chinese are being cagey about the identities of the astronauts (the names of the astronauts on the X-Prize flights were only released minutes before launch; although one leaked to us beforehand, Aero-News sat on the information until take-off).

The flight is scheduled to last five days -- or more exactly, 119 hours.

Yang is so far the only Chinese to fly in space; he did 14 orbits in October, 2003. Indeed, the only nations that have sent men unilaterally into space are the US, Russia (and the former Soviet Union), and China -- many nationals of other countries have traveled into space, but it's been on Russian or American hardware as members of international expeditions.

The Chinese space program borrows liberally from the knowledge amassed by Russian and American pioneers. The similarities of Chinese launch hardware to that of the Russians is obvious, and during the nineties, Chinese contributions to American politicians were rewarded with extensive access to sensitive US guidance and control technology.

Even in organization the similarity to the previous national space programs crops up -- most of the Chinese astronauts, like most American and Russian spacemen in the early days, come from the rank of fighter and test pilots. (Yang flew fighter jets before volunteering for space).

But the Chinese would have been fools not to build on the extensive work done by their international rivals beforehand, and nobody will suggest the managers of the Chinese space program are fools. They have come a long way in a short time. The Chinese manned spaceflight program got underway in 1992, and first launched a Shenzhou capsule, unmanned, on an orbital flight in November, 1999.

Of course, another way to look at it is it's taking them a heck of a long time to make proper use of the rocket which is, after all, a Chinese invention: circa 1150 AD.

FMI: www.cnsa.gov.cn/english