China ready to launch 'taikonauts'

BEIJING — Hoping to demonstrate its status as a rising global power, China confirmed Friday that it will launch a manned spacecraft into orbit sometime between Wednesday and next Friday, becoming only the third nation to hurtle astronauts into the heavens.

In a brief statement carried by the official Xinhua News Agency, China said the Shenzhou V spacecraft would orbit the Earth 14 times before landing.

If all goes well, China will join an exclusive space-traveling club some four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States accomplished the feat of putting humans into orbit.

Xinhua said the Shenzhou V spacecraft would lift off from the Jiuquan launch facility in the Gobi desert 900 miles west of Beijing and return to Earth at an undisclosed different location.

"Now all preparatory work for the launch is progressing smoothly," Xinhua quoted an unidentified space program official as saying.

China hasn't yet identified the mission's crew. Xinhua said a crew had followed a strict regimen of tests and training and that all members passed a comprehensive drill. Aboard the spacecraft will be at least one "taikonaut," the name China is giving its astronauts, employing the Chinese word for "space," which is "taikong."

Two channels on China's state television reportedly are preparing up to 10 hours of live coverage of the launch. State-run Chinese newspapers have been filled with stories about the launch, lifting the military secrecy that cloaks most of China's space activities, even reporting dissent in the scientific community about the cost of manned space missions.

The Shenzhou V is believed to be carrying reconnaissance and electronic intelligence-gathering equipment, as well as a bag of seeds for scientific purposes.

China denied Thursday that its space program has military as well as civilian goals, as the Pentagon hinted in an annual report issued in August. The Pentagon report said China's leaders probably viewed space-based weapons and missile defense systems, which the United States is pursuing, as "inevitabilities."

"China has never and will never participate in an arms race of any form in outer space," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said.

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The space flight is slated to come immediately after China's leaders conclude a crucial Communist Party meeting to discuss economic reforms, suggesting that party leaders want to bask in an event sure to stoke strong feelings of national pride and burnish China's international luster.