- SHANGHAI (Agence France Presse) - China plans to launch its own re-usable
"space shuttle" with a maiden unmanned mission at the end of
next year, an astronomical engineer working on one facet of the project
said Thursday.
-
- "The time is basically set for the
end of next year," Zhang Nan, who is in charge of one of dozens of
scientific research projects that will be aboard, said.
-
- "Among the projects will be many
experiments toward future manned shuttle missions," said the engineer,
who is affiliated with the Nanjing Zijinshan Astronomical Observatory.
-
- Zhang was quoted as making similar remarks
in the state-run Baokan Wenzhai daily on Thursday.
-
- China has never formally announced plans
to roll out a re-usable space vehicle like the ones the United States alone
operates.
-
- But the government-run Xinhua news agency
last month issued a dispatch saying the country would "try its best
to attain manned space flight by the end of this century or the beginning
of the next."
-
- "Research institutions have already
begun research on this area and made some achievements," the Jan.
4 report said.
-
- Xu Dazhe, a top domestic aerospace scientist,
said just a few months earlier that the immediate need in readying for
manned flights was to boost Chinese rockets' payload capacity.
-
- The country's boosters have only placed
five-tonne satellites in low geo-stationary orbits to date, while manned
missions would require lifting capacity of 20 tonnes or more, said Xu,
the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Launch-Vehicle Technology.
-
- Greater reliability and control technologies
are also emphasized in a 1992 Chinese long-term development plan.
-
- Asked if China had overcome its lift
capacity problems, Zhang said: "Of course those problems have already
been resolved."
-
- The engineer said he had been briefed
on the cost of the Chinese shuttle but that he could not reveal it, as
it is classified.
-
- He said the sensor device he is preparing
to send into orbit aims to locate the source of the universe's omnipresent
gamma rays -- an issue that has baffled astronomers.
-
- The Zijinshan observatory is leading
world research in the area, he said.
|
