BEIJING, China (CNN) -- China has moved a step closer to its first manned space flight with the successful launch Monday of its fourth unmanned spacecraft, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Xinhua said the Shenzhou ('Divine Vessel') IV was carried aloft by a Long March II F rocket, which blasted off from its Gobi desert launch pad at 12.40 a.m. (Beijing time) Monday morning (2.40 p.m. Sunday GMT).

It entered a preset orbit and was being tracked by monitoring stations in China and four survey ships in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

Scientists in charge of China's manned space program said the spacecraft's successful launch laid a "solid foundation" for the goal of sending Chinese astronauts into space, Xinhua reported.

So far, only Russia and the United States have launched manned spacecraft. China has given no target date for a manned attempt, but Monday's Shenzhou launch was the second in 10 months.

A successful manned flight would deliver immense prestige to China's space program.

China launched the Shenzhou I, Shenzhou II and Shenzhou III spacecraft in November 1999, January 2001 and March 2002 respectively from the same site, the Jiuquan satellite launch center in northwest China's Gansu Province.

Spacecraft modified
Xinhua quoted the spacecraft's leading designer, Qi Faren, as saying data from the three previous launches and return landings had been incorporated in the Shenzhou IV.

The spacecraft had been modified to make it a more comfortable place for astronauts to live and work in, and all the necessary systems for manned flight were installed on the Shenzhou IV craft.

A group of potential Chinese astronauts, chosen from air force fighter pilots, have been training for several years, with their commander Su Shuangning saying they used the Shenzhou IV for their first training inside a capsule.

Su said the astronauts were "absolutely capable" of making a manned flight, Xinhua reported.

According to Associated Press, China has sent at least two astronauts to Russia for training, and more may now be training there. The Shenzhou series of spacecraft is based on the Russian Soyuz design.

Monday's liftoff was the 27th consecutive successful launch of Chinese-made rockets since October 1996.

The orbiting spacecraft will return to earth after an unspecified period in space, Xinhua reported.

Practise with rescues
The third Shenzhou flight in March, which landed after 10 days in orbit, carried a dummy in a spacesuit. Officials said later that humans could have survived that flight.

China so far has brought its spacecraft back to land, rather than splashing down in the sea.

Xinhua quoted.Zhao Jun, commander and chief designer of the landing system, as saying a number of land and sea emergency rescue zones had been set up, and rescue workers had conducted trial rescue operations for manned flights.

Monday's liftoff was watched in Jiuquan by senior Chinese leaders, including chairman of the national legislature Li Peng, Vice Premier Wu Bangguo and Politburo member Jia Qinglin.

Race you to mars!

I personally am dissapointed that it seems none of the countires capable of manned spaceflight seem interested in going back to the moon.


I mean, it's right there..... why waste your time with Mars when obviously it's still just a bit out of our reach yet. Think of all the stuff you could do.


Guess the moon was just a fad of the Kennedy administration. :b

becuase theres hardly any reasonable proof that there is water on the moon, ya know the shipping costs of that kinda stuff?

It would be less costly to attempt to terraform mars than the long term supply of a moon space base..

Hey, I wasn't saying we should move in there or anything.... lol

You know, guys... If we redireced the billions of dollars spent on trying to get Mars and cleaned up our act a bit, we wouldn't NEED to move there.

We don't need to get anywhere.

And, OS, I know why we don't go back to the moon. It's not made of cheese after all. Now Mars, on the other hand...

lol. You guys have no love for the moon. And Mars, is simply comperable as being to us now what the moon was to people back in the day. If this civilization makes it that far into the future, I wonder if Mars will become the useless trodden on chunk of rock that the moon is today, while NASA tries to figure out how to let astronauts tiptoe through the rings of jupiter and count it's moons.... always lookin to bigger and better things, ya know.



Hey, actually now that would be fun..... :b

Read:

<h1>Red Mars</h1>

With this admonitory foray into a foreseeable future, Kim Stanley Robinson won the 1993 Nebula Award for best novel. In Red Mars, Robinson imagines the political, environmental, and social implications of successful human colonization of the red planet. With meticulous details and keen insight into human nature, of both the individual and of groups, the author takes his readers on an odyssey of titanic proportions, a tale that is a journey without a knowable conclusion.

In 2026, a group of one hundred carefully selected scientists from around the globe become the vanguard of Mars colonization. These visionaries will grow to love and hate one another, to form coalitions and to break them, to together mold the future of a planet. Carefully screened long before launch, the select few endure a year in Antartica to determine if they can make a tenable community. Coming out of that ordeal to the satisfaction of mission psychologist Michel Duval, the first hundred set off on the long trip to Mars.

Through self-deception and subterfuge, the colonists navigate the shoals of the psychiatric testing. But as they near their new home, it becomes increasingly apparent that members of this first wave have ideologies, passions, and political philosophies that will cause factions to arise. Idiosyncracies become pronounced, jealousies develop, and the first hundred becomes more and more fractured after landing safely and beginning the long process of constructing outposts.

The politics and economics of Earth have followed this internationally varied collection of intellectuals. Deep rifts occur between those who want to make Mars another Earth and those who passionately believe that Mars should remain unsullied to the fullest possible extent. Arguments and feuds occur between those who want to make Mars fully accessible and subject to the needs and desires of Earth and those who want to be fully independent of the home planet. As more and more humans follow the path of the first hundred, Martian soil will be rocked by explosive acts of environmental and political terrorism, and the lives of many of the first hundred will become forfeit in the struggle to determine the fate of an entire planet.

Speculative-fiction patriarch Arthur C. Clarke called Red Mars "the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written... it should be required reading for the colonists of the next century." Indeed, this is a story of the inevitable human struggle that constitutes the history of our own planet, a series of cautionary and intelligent what-ifs that could serve as a textbook for the many things to be considered before we carry our earthbound rivalries and dreams outside our own orbit.

<h1>Green Mars</h1>

Kim Stanley Robinson continues his epic of Mars colonization in Green Mars. Red Mars won the 1993 Nebula Award for best novel, and this, its sequel, garnered the Hugo Award for best novel in 1994. With good reason; the continuing story of the First Hundred and their intellectual and biological offspring is richly peopled, believably plotted, and chock-full of good hard science that Robinson expertly renders accessible to his lay readers.

The original colonists are now the First Hundred in name only; accidents, assassinations and one case of stubbornly resistant disease have diminished their true numbers. The upheavals, floods and explosions of 2061 made Maya, Hiroko, Sax, Ann, and the rest of the First Hundred keenly aware of their visibility as symbols of controversy and rebellion. Most have been in hiding in the intervening years as Earth continues to send a steady stream of new colonists to its nearest habitable neighbor. The legacy of 2061, World War III in all but name, is an Earth gone down a road of governments taken over by metanational corporations and a widening gap between the haves and have-nots -- those who are rich, powerful, or employed by a metanat receive timely longevity treatments; the rest of the population of the home planet has a difficult wait that may end before treatment can be divvied out by governments.

With populations exploding and natural resources waning, both the metanats and the masses view Mars as a safety valve. The threat of inundation, control, and exploitation by Earth brings the fractured remains of the First Hundred together, despite their sometimes extreme ideological differences, to effect what is best for the planet they now call home. Metanat security forces continue to try to sniff out the legendary original settlers and eliminate them as rallying points for the fiercely independent population of Mars; so it is that Maya, Nadia, Michel and Sax join forces with an emissary of a metanat that just might be better than a lesser evil. Some of the First Hundred take on new identities tendered them by the forever-neutral Swiss; some, like Hiroko and Coyote, continue to do their work wholly in the "underground," remaining hidden in plain sight on the polar caps, in the demimonde cities, and other sanctuaries while they gently but insistently push the areophany, a Gaia-like theory of oneness with the planet. Sax Russell and his followers keep working on making the surface of the planet viable, while Ann Clayborne and her Reds and Mars-Firsters insist on absolutely minimal change being made to the planet's surface and atmosphere.

The second- and third-generation children of Mars scatter across the spectrum of ideologies, charismatic leaders themselves whose ultimate goal, at least, is the same: independence from the Earth, a planet with no sentimental foothold whatsoever in their consciousness. As the face of Mars changes, a revolution bides its time, waiting impatiently for the trigger event that will provide the perfect, probably only opportunity for the denizens of Mars to begin to secure an independent, self-assertive collective soul.


<h1>Blue Mars</h1>

Kim Stanley Robinson's followup to the Hugo-winning Green Mars and the Nebula-winning Red Mars carries the full weight of nearly two centuries of future human history on its shoulders. Blue Mars is as richly detailed and believable as its predecessors, but with an extra heft of sentimentality not present in the first two books. All the old familiar faces are present (at least the ones still alive), and it is the continuing interplay between the remaining members of the First Hundred Martian colonists that sparks this series closer.

Mars is becoming increasingly blue, with its own oceans and canals. But the planet's future is still bitterly contested between the Reds, who want Mars to remain mostly as it was first found in the 21st century, and the Greens, who would remake the red planet into an approximation of Earth. The inhabitants of Mars aren't the only ones with a pointed interest in the matter: Earth is in extremely difficult straits, its overpopulation problem exacerbated by the now-ubiquitous longevity treaments and its infrastructure and habitable land mass greatly reduced by the flooding resulting from polar ice cap melt. Overburdened nations demand that the infant world government on Mars accept huge numbers of immigrants to relieve some of the "home" planet's pressures.

So it is that most of the remaining First Hundred, among them Nadia, Maya, Sax and Ann, find themselves pulled back into the thick of current affairs and politics. Out of hiding after the trials of 2061, these older but ageless elders of the two-world scene struggle to keep a transplanetary war from erupting while preserving as much as they can of the improved society they've helped to create on Mars. Sax Russell, in particular, is determined to bring the original Red, Ann Clayborne, to an understanding of the beauty of his terraforming efforts. It is around the skittish dance between Sax and Ann that the final events of the Mars trilogy play themselves out.

Perhaps of greater importance personally to the surviving First Hundred are the "quick declines" taking a toll on their number. Increasing memory loss, both long and short-term, seem to hold the key to the sudden deaths of these first ancients. It is Sax who throws himself into the task of discovering (or not) the magic cocktail that will give him and his oldest friends their minds and lives back, and allow them to at last enjoy the brave new world, indeed universe, that they have brought into being.

Blue Mars is by necessity time-compressed -- by the end of the book and series, the major players are more than 200 years old. Some immediacy is lost vis-a-vis large planetary and interplanetary events, but it is regained in the personal stories of the First Hundred and their biological and intellectual offspring. Most compelling are the chase-and-retreat played out by Ann and Sax over decades, and the younger Nirgal's search for meaning and contentment. Robinson's Mars books are destined for classic status among hard SF readers -- Blue Mars puts the perfect ending punctuation on a top-notch series.

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