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China Plans 5-day Manned Space Mission

Posted by timothy on from the remember-the-board-games dept.

rune writes "Both the BBC and The Register have articles on China's next manned space mission. This time two taikonauts are planned to be on board the Shenzou VI spacecraft sometime during 2005 for about five days. There is also a brief mention of the plans of the Chinese Space Agency for lunar exploration." hrld1,kon adds a link to this article on Chinaview, the official English-language news source for the People's Republic of China.

3 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Re:LOL by nels_tomlinson · · Score: 4, Informative
    ... the US sent men to the moon in the late 60's and the entire spacecraft had less computer power then a 486 computer... And they need to improve current technology?

    Well, there's always room for improvement. I'm sure they'd like to send more men up with less rocket booster than we could do 40 years ago. I bet they've already caught up to where we were in the '60s; after all, they've been making ICBMs for a long time now, they claim.

    As for the instrumentation, they make a lot of chips in China, but I think they're all consumer-grade, not radiation-hardened. Nowadays they should be able to collect a lot more data on the ship and its performance than we could get during the Apollo era.

    --
    See what I've been reading.
  2. Re:LOL by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Informative
    the US sent men to the moon in the late 60's and the entire spacecraft had less computer power then a 486 computer

    Actually, far less power than a 486. It was a 15-bit CPU (8K RAM, 64K ROM) with a memory cycle frequency of only 83 kHz.

  3. Re:Please, no more "taikonauts"! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The word taikonaut is not used in Chinese. The Chinese word for astronaut is yuhangyuan, and the official English term used in Chinese media is "Chinese astronaut".