The Chinese astronaut Wang Yaping teaches a class from space - RTVE

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Beijing Students raising their hands to ask the astronaut Wang Yaping. AFP PHOTO

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Chinese astronaut Wang Yaping before boarding the spacecraft on 11 June. EFE / LIU Huaiyu

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Some 60 million students in 80,000 schools in China have received a class on some physical phenomena in zero gravity. The Chinese astronaut, Wang Yaping, gave the lesson from the space lab Tiangong I (prototype of the future Chinese permanent station in the cosmos), through a video-conference also broadcast live on public television CCTV.

With this kind

, Beijing wants to bring to the people a program until now secretive and military. Thus, Wang showed the behavioral absence of gravity pendulums, gyroscopes and drops of water , in a class that reminded sometimes a magic show.

Astronaut asked questions physics to students and answered their questions. One student, for example, asked if there were space concepts “up and down”.

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only the second time in the history of space exploration in which there is a spatial class , after the U.S. Barbara Morgan had a similar experience in the International Space Station in 2007 three decades after the first and failed attempt, when the first “Professor Space” Christa McAuliffe, died in the Challenger shuttle accident.

McAuliffe was to be the first teacher in space, but died along with his six companions in the explosion of the Challenger few moments after takeoff, a tragedy that was broadcast live and received huge media attention by the news that she was the first civilian flying into space.

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Wang, meanwhile, is commander of the armed forces of the People’s Liberation Army, even before the martial parked children military and was shown as a young woman smiling and relaxed .

official press stressed that Wang is from the eastern province of Shandong, the same area where he was born the most famous professor of national history, the philosopher Confucius .

A 340 miles above Earth, Wang also introduced children to his fellow travelers, astronauts and Nie Haisheng Zhang Xiaoguang, flight commander.

Nie, the first Chinese astronaut repeated as space travel and was there in 2005, asked the children to “explore much” and delighted them with a floating pirouette in the air, in a similar position to that of a Buddhist monk meditating in order to show the students the power of zero gravity.

The three were launched into space on June 11, aboard the Shenzhou X, and plan to be 15 days orbiting the Earth, so they return to the planet next week.

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With this initiative, China, the t hird country able to launch astronauts into space (after EE. States., Russia), aims to bring ordinary citizens, 10 years after his first manned flight, a program so far opaque, to be administered by the People’s Liberation Army .

Also, gives new impetus to an initiative, spatial classes, which its tragic beginning was paralyzed for decades. The idea of ??teaching in the cosmos was an initiative of the U.S. government of Ronald Reagan, who created the program Teachers in Space in 1984, and selected McAuliffe and Morgan (the latter as reserve driver) 11,000 teachers across the country.

After the accident in 1986, Morgan took 12 years to travel into space (in 1998, with the shuttle Endeavour) and 20 to give a lesson similar to the spatial McAuliffe had given in 1986.

Morgan sent last week from Los Angeles a congratulatory letter to Wang Yaping , which wished him well in his class space ” on behalf of teachers and students around the world “. “You’ll be busy up there but take some time to look out the window,” said Morgan in his letter to Wang

The first Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei, traveled the cosmos the October 16, 2003 to aboard the Shenzhou V, and the current mission is the fifth manned Chinese space program, whose main objective is to lay groundwork for a permanent space station in the cosmos by early next decade.