China celebrates ten years of manned space travel - Reuters

: CCTV

MADRID

14 Oct (IRIN) –

China celebrates ten years of manned space travel in development on an ambitious program of rockets and with an eye to the ‘premiere’ of its space station, Tiangong-1.

Yang Liwei became the first Chinese to orbit on October 15, 2003. It was released in the Shenzhou 5 and its mission was to orbit the Earth for 21 hours. This event took place 40 years after the pioneering trip, Yuri Gagarin. Still, China was the third country to carry a human into space, after the Soviet Union and the United States.

After this experience, the Asian country has sent a total of ten astronauts – eight men and two women – to space in five separate missions. His last trip manned Shenzhou 10 occurred last June and was broadcast on public television. The President of China, Xi Jinping, received the astronauts before takeoff and told them that their work did your country “stronger”.

A year earlier, in June 2012, China sent into space the first woman, Liu Yang, who was selected as a member of the crew of the Shenzhou 9 mission to fly to the Chinese space station.

China is the leading country in this industry, but Yang himself, who is now deputy director of China’s manned space agency, explained that they have proposed developing countries interested in joining your program.

Thus, in a United Nations seminar on Space Technology offered to “train astronauts from other countries and organizations that are in such demand” and said China “would like to supply foreign astronauts travel”.