If Shenzhou-7 mission is successful, China will become the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to accomplish a spacewalk, a crucial capacity if China is to have its own permanent space station.

A giant leap

"China's space program has witnessed a giant leap forward in the past 16 years," Chinese President Hu Jintao said when he met scientists and technicians at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center and encouraged them to continue the efforts for a "complete success" of the Shenzhou-7 mission on Friday morning.

Hu, who saw off the three taikonauts on Thursday, said he felt "very happy" while witnessing the liftoff of Shenzhou-7 at the launch center.

"The efforts made by generations of scientists, cardres, workers, army officers and soldiers for the space program will never be forgotten," Hu said.

Hu said China still faced arduous tasks in the manned space program and he expressed his hope that Chinese scientists and researchers would "make persistent efforts and constantly strive to become stronger" so as to make further contributions in the manned space program.

Also on Friday, the chief designer of the spacecraft system Zhang Bainan said China would begin the mass production of its Shenzhou spacecraft starting from the Shenzhou-8 mission.

Zhang said the mass-produced model would serve as a shuttle between China's space station and the ground, and may also transport astronauts and cargo for other countries.

He revealed that the finalized model, highly home-made, should be safer, more reliable and able to support three astronauts to fly for seven days and complete the task of space station docking. "The mass production would also allow intensive launch in a short period of time," he said.

Apart from finalizing the model of China's manned spaceship, another mission of the Shenzhou-8 was to seek for a breakthrough in the orbiter docking technology, a must step for the ultimate goal of building a permanent space laboratory and a space engineering system that allow astronauts to conduct scientific experiments of larger scale.

(Xinhua News Agency September 27, 2008)