Nov 21 1999
From The Space Library
The People's Republic of China announced it had launched into orbit its first piloted spacecraft, a non-reusable capsule named Shenzhou, which carried a mannequin for test purposes but was capable of carrying a crew of four. Xinhua news agency reported that the capsule, launched from Jiuquan satellite launch center aboard the new model Long March 2F, had spent 21 hours in space, orbiting Earth 14 times. China had built a new land- and sea-based, space-monitoring-and-control network for the launch. China heralded the launch as a breakthrough in the Chinese government's effort to "join the United States and Russia in the elite club of manned space flight." The Chinese had abandoned the pursuit of human spaceflight in the late 1960s, because Premier Zhou Enlai thought it was too costly, but in 1992, President Jiang Zemin had decided to renew Chinese efforts, with the goal of putting a human in space by the end of the century. The head of China's Manned Spaceflight Program told Xinhua news agency that the successful test flight of the Shenzhou capsule demonstrated that the Chinese spacecraft and the new Long March rocket performed superbly. During the mission, the Chinese had conducted experiments in remote sensing, environmental monitoring, space materials, astronomy, and physics. Shenzhou had landed in Inner Mongolia using a parachute.
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