Unmanned Chinese craft returns to Earth, pronounced `technically suitable' for astronauts

Monday, April 1st 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

BEIJING (AP) _ China's third unmanned spaceship returned to Earth on Monday and was pronounced ``technically suitable for astronauts,'' the government said _ the latest step in its patriotism-streaked effort to become the third nation to put people in space.

The Shenzhou III landed on schedule at 4:51 p.m. in central Inner Mongolia, a region in northern China, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It had taken off nearly seven days before from a desert launch pad in northwestern China's Gansu province.

Xinhua quoted top officers at the China Manned Space Program, which is overseeing the series of test flights, as pronouncing the Shenzhou (pronounced ``shun-jo'') craft ``technically suitable for astronauts.''

``The successful launch and return of `Shenzhou III' have laid a solid basis for the country's future endeavor to send man to outer space,'' Xinhua said. It said dummy astronauts and instruments that simulate the human metabolism worked well during the mission.

Shenzhou's flight was tracked from a mission-control office in Beijing, a monitoring center in the western city of Xi'an and four monitoring vessels in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, Xinhua said.

The ship orbited 108 times before a surveying vessel in the southern Atlantic ordered one of its modules to return. Another module remained aloft and will continue to orbit the planet.

On Monday night, state television's official nightly newscast showed footage of the olive-colored, bowl-shaped ship at its landing site on the Mongolian grasslands. Helicopters hovered as technicians wearing flapped fur hats pried the top open.

Amid extensive computer simulations of orbit and landing, shots of mission control in Beijing cut to views of military officials watching the landing. Also shown: workers in red jumpsuits cheering and leaping into the air in delight.

The extent of the coverage _ one four-minute report and, later in the newscast, another two-minute report _ illustrated the importance attached to the event. China hopes to join Russia and the United States as the only nations to have put people in space; its eventual aim is a permanently manned space station.

Such success in a field traditionally considered both patriotic and emblematic of technological progress could help President Jiang Zemin's effort to secure a permanent place in Chinese history.

Clad in military green, the 75-year-old Jiang watched last week from a plateau near where the Great Wall ends as a Long March II F rocket carried the craft into orbit. His presence was a high-profile sign of his communist government's increasing confidence in its decade-old program.

He called the launch ``a new milestone in the development of our aerospace industry.''

The manned program, code-named Project 921, has been conducted in high secrecy, and China has not said when its first ``taikonauts,'' coined from the Chinese word for outer space, will blast into orbit.

Chinese scientists will analyze and study instruments and experimental samples aboard the module, which Xinhua said will be transported to Beijing later this week. The module was aloft for six days and 18 hours, Xinhua said.

The previous two unmanned Shenzhou vessels were launched in November 1999 and January 2001. The first circled Earth 14 times during 21 hours in space; the second orbited for a week.