The Shenzhou IV spaceflight, which blasted off from northwest China Monday, had gone "quite well" and had fulfilled all its scheduled missions, especially those related to astronaut survival in space, the China Daily quoted an unidentified Shenzhou IV engineer saying.

However, the engineer said, the flight can only really be deemed successful after the spacecraft returns to earth and lands with "precision and safety."

The spaceship is scheduled to return to earth late Sunday in central Inner Mongolia.

China Daily said the Shenzhou IV went into space with all the prerequisites for a manned flight and even had spare clothes that astronauts might need to change into.

Two previous unmanned spacecrafts which China put into space, the Shenzhou II and Shenzhou III, were also capable of manned flight, but the Shenzhou IV system guarantees astronauts' complete safety, the Xinhua news agency quoted Qi Faren, the spacecraft's chief designer, as saying.

"We have designed and tested eight systems altogether to ensure that the astronauts can escape at every stage of the flight if there is an accident," Qi was quoted as saying.

Before the Shenzhou IV was sent to the launching pad, astronauts had trained in it.

The Shenzhou IV also has improved living conditions for astronauts, China Daily said.

Equipment inside the spacecraft was rearranged to make astronauts feel more comfortable to live and work in the capsule.

The satisfactory performance of the Long March 2F rocket, which helped the spacecraft blast off into orbit, has also added to Chinese scientists' confidence that a manned flight can be carried out successfully in the near future, China Daily said.

The Shenzhou IV flight is widely seen as the final dress rehearsal before China later this year joins the United States and the former Soviet Union as the only nations to send a human into orbit.

By early Friday it had orbited earth 69 times.

The Chinese space programme, set up in 1992, is run by the military and is shrouded in official secrecy.

Compared with the three previous unmanned space capsules China has launched between November 1999 and March 2002, Shenzhou IV represents the country's most sophisticated and fullest preparation so far to realize the nation's long-cherished dream of manned space flight, Yuan Jie, director of the Shanghai Aerospace Bureau, was quoted by state media saying this week.

Yuan has said this will happen in the second half of the year, although another official Friday indicated that this was not a foregone conclusion.

SPACE.WIRE