Success in space is a powerful symbol of China’s rising power, of its improving technical expertise, and of the Communist Party’s remarkable progress in turning around the once isolated and impoverished country.
The module is considered the first step toward China operating a permanent space station by approximately 2020, making it the world’s third country to do so.
Yang Liwei, the country’s first astronaut, told Xinhua that Chinese astronauts might not pray like their foreign counterparts do before they set off on a space mission but Communism, as their shared faith, supports them.
“If the country has its own space station, Chinese astronauts, who are party members, might set up a party branch up there,†Mr Yang said.
These days, the United States is focused on more earthbound matters, and on exploring distant planets like Mars, but over the next decade, China’s space programme will really go into orbit, as it seeks to reflect its growing economic power with a significant presence in space. The crew of two men and one woman were all veteran Air Force pilots before being selected as astronauts, although it was not said whether they would sing David Bowie’s Space Oddity in Chinese while in orbit.
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