Unmanned Chinese craft returns to Earth

BEIJING -- The aerospace workers in red jumpsuits leaped into the air and cheered. The military officials, all in a row at mission control, nodded approvingly. And the odd, bowl-shaped craft sat intact upon the Mongolian grassland, carrying a country's hopes for a spaceborne future.

Such were the scenes broadcast on China's state television Monday -- a triumphal government accounting of an endeavor that Beijing casts as a mix of technological progress and patriotic fervor: its long march toward putting a human being -- a Chinese human being -- in space.

The Shenzhou craft (pronounced "shun-jo") landed on schedule at 4:51 p.m. in central Inner Mongolia, a region in northern China. It had taken off nearly seven days before from a desert launch pad in northwestern China's Gansu province.

Officials from the government's China Manned Space Program, which placed dummy astronauts and instruments that simulate human metabolism aboard the craft, proclaimed it "technically suitable for astronauts" -- an announcement as much political as it was scientific.

Heralded on newscast

A dramatic, almost cinematic style -- high-tech, 3-D graphics and videos of helicopters hovering as technicians wearing flapped fur hats pried the Shenzhou III's top open -- permeated the two reports that filled six full minutes of the state newscast Monday evening.

It illustrated the importance that China attaches to the successful mission both as a source of domestic pride and an emblem of international stature. China hopes to join Russia and the United States as the only nations to put people in space.

Its eventual aim is a permanently manned space station, a success that not only helps China but could push President Jiang Zemin further toward his goal of securing 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.

Shenzhou's flight was tracked from a mission-control office in Beijing, a monitoring center in the western city of Xi'an and four 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 Earth.

Chinese scientists will analyze and study instruments and experimental samples aboard the module, which Xinhua said will be transported to Beijing 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.