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.