Space fever has hit Hong Kong. By 7:30 pm Wednesday, a crowd had snapped up all 58,500 day-time admission tickets for the exhibition on China's first manned space mission.

Night tickets are being made available to ensure many more people can see the event at the Hong Kong Science Museum from November 1 to 4.

The event is being staged to welcome the visit of China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, Friday.

To allow more people the chance to see the exhibition, Secretary for Home Affairs Patrick Ho announced that the hours of the event had been extended, with an extra 27,000 night tickets made available to the public.

By 8:00 pm, more than 30 percent of the additional tickets had been distributed. The Leisure and Cultural Services Department will continue to give out night tickets at 18 outlets from 10:00 am this morning.

Ho described the ticket distribution as smooth. By 4:20 pm, more than 90 percent of the tickets had been given out. Due to the enthusiastic response, the authorities concerned decided to extend the opening hours of the exhibition and notified the Transport Department accordingly.

The department said that they are working on plans to support the night viewings of the show. The three bus companies said there are already night buses stopping at the entrance of the Cross Harbor Tunnel. They pledged to monitor the situation closely and promised to deploy more buses when necessary.

To ensure they are allocated the time slot they want, some people started to line up outside the box offices in the small hours yesterday morning. Each session is half an hour long, and the most popular time slots are 10:30 am -- 12:30 pm and 2:00 -- 6:30 pm on Saturday and 10:00 am -- 6:30 pm on Sunday. Tickets for these sessions have all been taken. There were once close to 1,000 people gathering at the ticket outlets at the Cultural Center and the Space Museum. By 9:30 pm last night, more than 60,000 tickets had been distributed, 9,893 of them being night tickets.

The four-day exhibition will display such items as the re-entry capsule of the Shenzhou-V spaceship, space suits and space food.

(China Daily HK Edition October 30, 2003)