* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Shenzhou V

Blobrana · L

Shenzhou 5 was the first human spaceflight mission of the People's Republic of China (PRC), launched on October 15, 2003. The Shenzhou spacecraft was launched on a Long March 2F rocket booster. There had been four previous flights of unmanned Shenzhou missions since 1999. China became the third country in the world to have independent human spaceflight capability after the Soviet Union (later, Russia) and the United States.
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Blobrana · L

As the nation held its collective breath, China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, floated back to the motherland, having orbited Earth 14 times in the Shenzhou 5, or Divine Capsule.
It was October 2003, and the national broadcaster CCTV carried live coverage of the momentous event, from Mr. Yang's famous pleasantries uttered in space - "I feel good" - to the instant that workers opened the capsule door to reveal the pale but smiling face of a hero, offering irrefutable evidence that China's maiden manned space voyage had gone off without a hitch.

Or had it?

In a lecture he gave to a group of journalism students last month, a top official at Xinhua, the state news agency, said that the mission was not so picture-perfect. The official, Xia Lin, described how a design flaw had exposed the astronaut to excessive G-force pressure during re-entry, splitting his lip and drenching his face in blood.
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Shenzhou 5

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