1957年，得知苏联成功将第一颗人造卫星斯普特尼克一号送上天时，英、美、中三国领导人都震惊不已。毛主席当时感慨道：“我们怎么能算得上一个大国？中国连一颗土豆都弄不到太空里去。”

Chinese scientists have promised the ultimate great leap forward: a Chinese astronaut in orbit by 2005 and a manned landing on the moon by 2010 -followed by a permanent lunar base to exploit the new high frontier of commerce.1

Chairman Mao, like the British and the Americans, was stunned when the Soviet Union launched the space age in 1957 with Sputnik I2. "How can we be considered a great power?" he asked. "China cannot even put a potato in space."

"China is expected to complete its first exploration of the moon in 2010 and will establish a moon base just as we did on the North and South Poles," said Ouyang Ziyuan, head of China's moon exploration program as he launched the country's national science and technology week in Beijing.3

The price of space exploration is enormous. Russia and the United States -the only two countries to have achieved manned flight -are struggling to keep their new investment, the international space station, aloft.4

But China has a long tradition in physics, mathematics and engineering5, and its doctoral graduates have been welcomed in the US and Europe for decades. It can throw huge resources at technical problems, and it has been able to learn from 40 years of pioneering triumphs and mistakes by the Soviet Union and the US.6

Space flight is a gamble with high stakes7. If successful, China could have founder membership of the world's most exclusive club -a second home on the moon -as well as a powerful hand at the strategic bargaining table.8

China has been putting payloads9 into orbit since 1970, with the first launch of its Long March rocket. Since then, it has made 73 launches, 62 of them successfully. It has been putting up Western satellites on a commercial basis for more than a decade, although there have been setbacks.10 A Long March rocket with a telecommunications satellite11 aboard exploded on launch in 1995, killing six people. The following year another launch put a US dollars 120 million Chinese satellite into the wrong orbit.

Since the start of the 1990s China has signalled12 its plans to move cautiously into manned flight. Engineers began building a space centre in Jiuquan City, Gansu Province, and in 1992 a Hong Kong-based news agency quoted an official as saying: "The launch and retrieval of the first space shuttle will take place in the new space centre and the bases in its vicinity.13 It will take about 10 years to accomplish this grand project."

The first spacecraft built for manned flight, Shenzhou14 -or Divine Mission -went up without any humans aboard, into test orbit around Earth in 1999.

In 2001, China sent a monkey, a dog, a rabbit and snails into space aboard Shenzhou II.15 And a test in March of the Shenzhou III unmanned spacecraft, with dummy astronauts aboard,16 was hailed "a major step forward in China's ambition to send a man in space".

When China's Long March Ⅳ rocket capsule17 floated two smiling human dummies safely to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia in January 2003, the nation was ecstatic18. The event cleared the way for a Long March Ⅴ launch next fall -China's first manned space flight, an orbital mission expected to carry two or three astronauts for up to eight days.

China's string of four successful space launches since 1999 is a major source of national and scientific pride here. If all goes well, Long March Ⅴ will place China as first among equals in a nascent Asian manned space race that includes Japan and India.19 It will rank China as No. 3 in space capability behind the US and Russia. And it will put China in a position to talk more credibly about proposed space stations and moon missions in the next decade.

It was not until the development of the Long March family of rockets in the late-1990s, and an agreement to cooperate with Moscow, that Beijing really began a full-scale military and civilian pursuit of the heavens. The Chinese purchased a Soyuz-style20 system from the Russians, along with astronaut pressure suits and docking units that allow for larger multipart spacecraft. Beijing sent two astronauts to Moscow for training as well, according to Philip Clark, coauthor of Jane's Space Directory21, in London.

"Some Western reports say that the Chinese simply copied the Russian program, but this is a misunderstanding," argues Mr. Clark. "They observed how the Russians solved problems, but they built their own highly modified equipment."

In the 1960s space race, it took the Soviet program less than a year to move from test rockets to a manned mission. It took the US 18 months to perfect its Mercury program22 for manned flight.

By contrast, the Chinese Long March family of rockets will -if successful -complete manned flight in something closer to four years. But if the Long March Ⅴ mission takes a three-person crew aloft for a week or longer, it will in one flight have moved the Chinese far past the early record of either the Russian and American programs, which went through a four-year period of launching first one man, and then several, into orbit.

"The Chinese program is going painfully slowly," says Professor Clark. "But then the Chinese aren't racing anybody. If the Long March Ⅴ goes for seven or eight days, the Chinese will have started their manned program at about the same level the US reached with Gemini Ⅴ23."

On Jan. 4, shortly after the Long March Ⅳ landed in Mongolia, India announced that it was developing a moon-landing program costing tens of billions of dollars. Some Western scientists are dubious24, and others point out that the Chinese themselves announced in 2000 that they would be on the moon by 2005. Today's estimate in China for a manned moon landing is closer to between 2020 and 2030.

Currently, however, what separates the Chinese program from those of India or the Japan, is the size of the payload capability25 of the Long March family of rockets. Manned missions, whether for space stations or for lunar exploration, require ultraheavy payloads -of a type neither India or Japan have yet developed. The current Chinese Long March Ⅳ rocket can send 14 tons into orbit. A new generation of Long March rockets, estimated to be finished in three years, is expected to carry 23 tons.

1. 2005年前实现载人宇航； 2010年前实现宇航员登陆月球，随后建立一个永久性的月球基地，开发新的商业领域。 lunar: 月的，月球上的。

2． Sputnik I：斯普特尼克一号。1957年10月4日苏联发射的第一颗人造地球卫星。

3． 中国月球探险计划负责人欧阳自远在北京国家科技周的开幕式上说：“中国将在2010年之前完成第一次月球探险计划，并将在月球上建立类似南北两极研究站那样的研究基地。”

4． 世界上惟一实现过载人宇航的两个国家，俄罗斯和美国，为了维持它们的新投资 （项目）——国际空间站而做着各种努力。aloft：在高处，在空中。

5． engineering：工程学。

6． 它在技术问题方面可以投入大量资源， 还能够从40年来前苏联和美国的宇航试验中汲取经验和教训。

7． stake：赌注。

8． 倘若成功，中国就能够获得世界上会员限制最严格的俱乐部——“月球第二家园”——的创办人资格，同时，还能在战略谈判桌上掌握主动权。

9. payload：[空]（火箭的）有效载重，本句意思是“中国已将具有有效载重的航空火箭送入太空”。

10. 近十多年来，中国一直为西方国家进行商业卫星发射服务，尽管其中也有失败的例子。setback: 挫折，失败。

11．telecommunications sate-llite：无线电通讯人造卫星。

12. signal：非正式（或间接地）表明。

13.（中国）第一个太空舱的发射和回收将在新的太空研究中心及其附近的基地进行。vicinity: 周围地区，邻近地区。

14.即“神州”可载人宇宙飞船。

15．2001年1月10日，中国自行研制的神舟二号航天飞船在西部酒泉卫星发射中心发射升空。

16．2002年3月25日，神舟三号飞船（飞船上装有人体代谢模拟装置、拟人生理信号设备以及形体假人）在酒泉卫星发射中心发射升空并成功进入预定轨道，经过近７天太空飞行后，4月1日在内蒙古中部地区成功着陆。

17. capsule：太空舱。

18. ecstatic：狂喜的。

19. 如果一切顺利，长征五号将使中国成为新兴的亚洲载人宇航竞争中的佼佼者， 日本和印度也是这一竞争的参与者。first among equals：平等者中的首席，平辈中的出类拔萃者；nascent：新生的，开始发展的。

20. Soyuz：“联合号”，为俄罗斯一载人宇宙飞船的名字。

21.《简氏航天指南》，简氏情报集团出版发行。该集团为目前世界上最大的防务、宇航和运输方面的情报机构和出版商。

22．Mercury program: 美国航空航天局（NASA）的水星计划，是美国1958年开始实施的第一个载人航天计划，1962年进行首次载人轨道飞行，于1963年结束，共完成25次飞行试验，其中包括4次动物飞行，2次载人弹道飞行，4次载人轨道飞行，耗资约4亿美元。

23．Gemini Ⅴ ：双子星座五号宇宙飞船，于1965年8月21日发射，为美国1961年11月至1966年11月实施的“双子星座”计划系列之一。其主要任务是研究、发展载人登月的技术和训练航天员长时间飞行及舱外活动的能力。该计划历时5年，完成了10次环地轨道载人飞行，每次2人，共花费12.8亿美元。

24．dubious：怀疑的。

25．payload capability：有效荷载能力。