Chinese in space?

no links. But on another forum, there was a Chinese guy waxing lyrical about China's achievment, and asking if the US was watching. I wondered why the hell they'd bother, considering they've been doing it for 40 years, and the Chinese are just doing it with stolen US technology anyway.

There are several articles on www.cnn.com. I'd drag one up, but I'm home now after work and tired. . .

I say congrats to them. I was really disappointed by the lackluster attempts the US has had lately making a presence in space. What with the Columbia going down. . .well. . . they're not doing much to bolster my confidence. What we need is a good old fashioned space race again. Since Russia isn't going to do it, I say let the Chinese step up and have a turn, and good luck to them.

Given the politics behind it all, it's probably no more of a threat to world peace than the Soviets/Russians having it. It's still beyond me why the Europeans haven't got round to manned flights yet though. Maybe because there's no point, when (like you say) the US did it years ago, and they'll let us copy their technology anyway (once they've upgraded to something better).

Hey, don't knock it, one day you'll be able to order Kung Pao Chicken from Mars...and that's pretty cool...

It would be interesting if the Japanese ever got in on the act - the craft would be smaller, faster & cheaper, but have ridiculous names like 'Spaceship' or 'Rocket'.

Chinese take out food from space
Chinese Astronaut Says Space Food Tastes 'Great'
10/15/03

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's first man in space told his wife and son Wednesday that the bite-size food he took along for his 21-hour journey around Earth tasted "great."

"Daddy, have you eaten rice yet? What did you eat?" eight-year-old Yang Ningkang asked his astronaut father in a conversation broadcast on state television.

"I've already eaten, ate space food," said Yang Liwei, 38, during his eighth orbit around Earth. "It tastes great."

Yang was to dine on specially designed packets of more than 20 kinds of family-style Chinese fare, including shredded pork with garlic sauce, spicy "kung pao" chicken and "eight treasures" rice, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Yang's meals were to be washed down with Chinese herbal tea and health boosting tonics, it said.

U.S. Drove Out Founder of China's Rocketry Program
Oct 15, 2003
U.S. Drove Out Founder of China's Rocketry Program
By Joe McDonald
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) - The founder of China's rocketry program that on Wednesday launched its first astronaut into space began his career building ballistic missiles for the U.S. government during World War II.
Tsien Hsue-shen, 92, was a U.S. Army officer, a co-founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Colleagues called him one of the brightest minds in the new field of aeronautics.

Then, in 1955, Tsien was driven out of the United States at the height of anticommunist fervor.

Born in 1911 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Tsien left for the United States after winning a scholarship to graduate school in 1936. He earned a doctorate and became a professor at the California Institute of Technology, later moving to MIT.

During World War II, Tsien helped to design ballistic missiles for the U.S. military. In 1945, as an Army colonel with a security clearance, he was sent to Europe on a mission to examine captured rocket technology from Nazi Germany.

Tsien studied the German V-2 rocket and interviewed its chief designer, Wernher von Braun, who would go on to play a key role in the American manned space program.

After the war, Tsien married the daughter of a military adviser to Chinese leader Gen. Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, Tsien applied to become a U.S. citizen, shortly before Chiang's Nationalist forces were defeated by Mao Zedong's communists.

As anticommunist unease in the United States mounted, the FBI confronted Tsien in 1950 with a U.S. Communist Party document from 1938 that listed him as a member.

Tsien denied being a communist, but he was briefly arrested and lost his security clearance. Washington began hearings to deport him, though he was never charged with a crime.

After five years of virtual house arrest and secret negotiations between Washington and Beijing, Tsien left for his homeland in 1955.

Four months later, Tsien presented then-Premier Zhou Enlai with a proposal to set up an "aerospace industry for national defense," according to the Chinese Communist Party newspaper People's Daily. He joined the party in 1958.

Tsien, whose name also is written Qian Xuesen or Tsien Hsue-sen, led development of China's first nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and worked on its first satellite, launched in 1970.

He retired in 1991, the year before China's latest manned space program was launched. But his research formed the basis for the Long March CZ-2F rocket that carried astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit.

Today Tsien is an enigma - showered with official honors by Beijing, which named him "king of rockets," but rarely seen in public.

In her 1996 biography of Tsien, "The Thread of the Silkworm," American author Iris Chang says he tried to erase his past, destroying documents and asking friends not to talk about him.

In an unusual burst of publicity, Tsien was publicly honored on his 90th birthday in 2001.

Then-President Jiang Zemin visited him at home, where state media said the ailing Tsien was confined to bed. People's Daily ran a large photo of the meeting on its front page.

"He's the father of our space industry," Luan Enjie, director of the China National Space Administration, told the Orlando Sentinel in 2001. "It's difficult to say where we would be without him."

This story can be found at: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAY38EETLD.html

good luck to China.

also japan