A Joke Considering First Man Went Up in 1961 [ MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2003 12:03:47 AM ] China to launch its manned space mission on Oct 15 It would be better to call it China's Late Creep Forward, given that Beijing i s attempting to showcase a four-decade-old technology. Even if the flight of the much fanfared Shenzhou 5 is successful, it will have merely carried one or more astronauts aloft for a few orbits of Earth lasting the duration of a day. That's almost exactly what the Soviets accomplished wh en they put Yuri Gagarin in space in 1961. If this is China's idea of arriving, then it's come at a time when the other t wo space-faring nations have left it light years behind. That's not all; it co uld also be argued that China's entire space programme has virtually come pigg yback on the shoulders of giants. The person responsible for the launch of China's first rocket and satellite, f or instance, was Qian Xuesen, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab conducting classified rocket research in the United States who was deported after being suspected of being a communist. Subsequently, not only have Chinese astronauts been trained in Russian space f acilities but the Shenzhou's airframe is modelled on a Soyuz spacecraft. Some people might point to the fact that India seems to be going the same way in its space programme with the latest being an extravagant mission to the Moo n. However, there are two essential differences. Firstly, the Indian effort is vastly home-grown, right from supercomputers to cryogenic engines to geosynchronous launch vehicles. Secondly, and more import antly, in spite of the battering India's democratic image gets from time to ti me, dissent in the country is still allowed and indeed flourishes. Not so in China, which is why it can keep on spending upwards of two billion d ollars annually on such a project without anyone daring to question it openly. This could have grave consequences in a country where a significant number of its 1.2 billion people subsist on less than one dollar a day. The success of Shenzhou 5 would in that case be a purely PR exercise event-managed from insid e.