Moon landing gets timetable
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The timetable for China's first manned moon landing, as well as the launch of a space station, lab and probes to explore Mars and Venus, was announced by scientists over the weekend.
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Artistic rendering of moon landing. [File photo] |
Chinese analysts, however, dismissed international concerns that Beijing is engaging in an outer-space arms race, stressing that recent activities and future missions are for scientific purposes and for the benefit of mankind.
In a visit to the country's space base in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, Saturday, Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut to voyage beyond the planet's atmosphere in 2003, revealed plans to launch the country's first unmanned space laboratory, Tiangong-1, next year, which is expected to accomplish the country's first unmanned docking with Shenzhou-8, a crucial step toward building a space station.
Both the manned spacecraft Shenzhou-9 and the unmanned Shenzhou-10 will be launched in 2012 to dock with the Tiangong space laboratory, and by around 2020 China will launch its first orbital space station, Yang said.
Meanwhile, at an aerospace engineering forum Thursday, Ye Peijian, Commander in Chief of the Chang'e Program and an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said China's lunar-probe program, the country's first step toward deep-space exploration, is expected to orbit the moon, land and return to Earth by 2020.
Ye proposed that China launch its first manned moon landing in 2025, a probe to Mars by 2013 and to Venus by 2015.
