U.S. delegation given tour of Chinese space center Wednesday

BEIJING — China provided an American military delegation with a first-ever glimpse into its space program's mission control center, which a few months ago guided the nation's first manned flight to orbit and back.

The delegation, led by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was taken on a 40-minute tour of the facility on Wednesday.

No foreign delegation had been allowed inside the Beijing Aerospace Control Center previously. A small group of reporters accompanied Myers but were not allowed to take photographs.

The center is located in the Space City complex in a northwestern suburb of Beijing. Its command room resembles in many ways the mission control room at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

At the Beijing center, rows of workstations, each with a Dell computer monitor, sit before three massive screens on one wall.

When the center is running — it appeared almost deserted Wednesday — an operator at each station monitors one of the subsystems of the Chinese spacecraft. The central main screen had a world map with an overlay of the spacecraft's orbit.

On either side of the main screens are banners bearing Chinese characters and encouraging messages. On the left: "Achieve the Chinese people's dream of flying in the sky." On the right: "Realize the complete success of the first manned space mission."

On Oct. 15, the mission control center did precisely that. After blasting off from the Gobi Desert, Taikonaut Col. Yang Liwei orbited Earth several times in a modified Russian Soyuz capsule before landing safely inside China's borders.

With the mission, called Shenzhou 5, China joined Russia and the United States as the only nations with manned spaceflight programs.

Even as President Bush is expected to press for a base on the Moon and a Mars mission on Wednesday, Beijing too has suggested grander plans for a space station and a lunar base. It has also announced a second manned mission to take place by 2005.

China regards its space program as a matter of international prestige. Aspects of its space program, particularly intelligence-gathering satellites, also have military purposes.

The Bush administration has been congratulatory toward China's successful space flight, and Myers was no exception.

"Congratulations. You've had a great success," Myers told Chinese space program officials during the tour.