Gobi desert setting for historical China space flight

BEIJING (AFP) Oct 13, 2003
When China finally sends a man into orbit, it will be from deep in the country's remote northwest, 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) west of the capital Beijing in the vast Gobi Desert.

A veil of secrecy and tight security has been thrown around the isolated launch centre in Gansu province and the launch pad in Inner Mongolia, but they have been used many times before to send satellites into space.

Near an ancient Great Wall ruin, the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, also known as Shuang Cheng Tzu, is China's first ballistic missile and satellite launch centre and its facilities have provided support for virtually every phase of China's satellite launch campaigns.

All four of Shenzhou's unmanned missions have blasted off from here.

Jiuquan was a desert when the center was first established nearly half a century ago, but now has become an eco-friendly city with more than 60 oases, a swimming pool and a nature park, Xinhua news agency reported.

But a space mission involves far more than just a launch site.

According to Space Today Online, the progress of Shenzhou V, which is scheduled to lift-off some time between Wednesday and Friday, will be monitored from half a dozen locations.

In preparation for piloted flights, the Chinese built a new mission control center, known as Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Centre, (48 kilometres) 30 miles northwest of the capital.

Once in the air, Shenzhou will be tracked by four large ships -- Yuanwang, or Long View, 1, 2, 3 and 4, which China refers to as "maritime aerospace survey vessels".

All of them were overhauled at the end of the 1990s in preparation for piloted flight. They tracked the unmanned flights of the four previous Shenzhou capsules between November 1999 and January 2003, the website said.

The official Xinhua news agency has reported the ships have been assigned to the western Pacific Ocean, southern Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean west of Australia, and southern Atlantic Ocean to track and control Shenzhou.

In addition, a tracking, telemetry and command station has been constructed at the South Atlantic coastal town of Swakopmund in central Namibia in east Africa, Space Today Online said.

China's Xian Satellite Control Centre, in northern China's Shaanxi province, operates it while other tracking stations are in Pakistan and at the Jiuquan spaceport.

The Xian monitoring center will be in charge of the re-entry module's recovery from the vast Inner Mongolian plains, if the landing goes as planned.

SPACE.WIRE