China launches astronaut into Earth Orbit

China Becomes Third Nation to Put Man in Space

By Brian Rhoads

BEIJING (Reuters) - China put its first man in space Wednesday, sending a single astronaut on a 21-hour odyssey around the Earth four decades after the Soviet Union and the United States pioneered manned space flight.

The Long March 2F rocket carrying "taikonaut" Yang Liwei lifted off into a clear blue sky over the Gobi desert at 9 a.m. and entered its predetermined orbit 10 minutes later.

story.news.yahoo.com.../nm/20031015/sc_nm/space_china_dc

Yep, the cnn link...

www.cnn.com...

Interesting... Looks like as well as considering the Euro in order to break the US position in international trade...now they want to break the US position in space and commercial satellites... Favored nation, my ass... There's more implication here than just the furthering of their science programs...

Hope this will awaken the USA...

I'm sure we could do much better in space technology if we had some competition and we actually tried.

did anyone else see the tape on either cnn/fox?

it showed three very high very bright fast moving objects. one was supposedly the chinese craft the other two were moving just as fast but in different directions (i.e zigzags, circles etc). it was filmed in nebraska or something like that.

(posted this in annother thread too.)