Today’s vocabulary word is yunhangyuan
5 o'clock, October 15, 2003
Looks like China’s done it.
[Washington Post] China on Wednesday became the third nation to send a man into space, launching a Long March 2F rocket that carried a 38-year-old former fighter pilot on a journey to take him around Earth 14 times, state media reported.
The Chinese space mission, which came 42 years after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American Alan Shepard became the first men in space, was expected to last 21 hours. The capsule, containing the astronaut, known as a taikonaut or yunhangyuan in Chinese, is scheduled to touch down near the Jiuchuan launch station in the Gobi Desert, 1,000 miles west of Beijing.
Figure 1. Long March 2F rocket carrying Shenzhou 5 space capsule.
State media identified the taikonaut as Lt. Col. Yang Liwei, from Manchuria. Yang was described as an athletic former fighter pilot who has an 8-year-old son, likes swimming and skating, and has not seen his younger brother or elder sister in three years while he prepared to become China's first man in space.
. . . China's media appeared poised to turn the launch into a grand campaign touting China's communist system. "I will not disappoint the motherland," Yang was quoted on China's biggest news Web site www.Sina.com, as saying. "I will complete each movement with total concentration. And I will gain honor for the People's Liberation Army and for the Chinese nation." He added, "See you tomorrow."
The space program, which is believed to have a budget of $2 billion a year, is run by the People's Liberation Army.
Gosh, it’s just like the good old days, only without the depressing nuclear standoff. Makes me want to dig up my Sino-Colombian cold war novel again.
Gosh, it’s just like the good old days, only without the depressing nuclear standoff.
It was nice to see the NASA director wish the Chinese mission well, and there's obviously much less tension and acrimony between larger powers than there were between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
But the Chinese are still a repressive regime with gross human rights violations, who like to try to cover things (SARS) rather than deal with them in a sensible manner. And I'm wary of anyone who buddies up to North Korea.
It wasn't too long ago that we had a hair-raising standoff with the Chinese over one of our surveillance planes and crew.
They've apparently bought a lot of the equipment and training from the former Soviet Union, but have gone to great efforts to make this an entirely Chinese affair.
I do wish them well, but with reservations. And I'll look forward to the day when China is able to engage in a joint mission, either with an Asian neighbor or two, the Europeans, or us.