"I've never heard of Shenzhou V," said Song Xinqiao, a 33-year-old rice farmer from central China's Hunan province pushing his bicycle as he went from building to building looking for work in Beijing.

"I've never heard of our country wanting to send someone into space."

With just days to go before the expected October 15 launch to make China only the third country in the world to put a man in orbit, the nation's state-run media has practically ignored the event.

Only the lesser-controlled Chinese portals carry stories, and mostly from the independent Hong Kong media.

People arriving at Beijing's Railway Station also seemed clueless.

"What is it? It's the first time I've heard of those words, Shenzhou," said Xue Ni, from southwest China's Sichuan province, referring to the name of the Chinese spacecraft.

Their ignorance highlights the cloak of secrecy over the project, which despite having been in the works since 1992 and having cost an estimated 2.3 billion US dollars of taxpayers' money, has been kept largely under wraps.

Fear of failure and the public disappointment that will come along with it has convinced China's leaders to keep the plan hushed, analysts said.

Unlike other countries where sending a person into space is prefaced with publicity and fanfare, China is a less confident country with more to prove and more to lose if the flight fails.

The culture of keeping the public in the dark was most apparent at the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing.

Inside the exhibition hall, a woman laid flat on her stomach on a para-wing glide simulator as she gazed down at a TV screen offering a bird's eye view of fields.

A small crowd not far away watched mesmerised as a robot conducted an electronic orchestra.

But nobody paid attention to a large display near the center of the hall -- a model of a spacecraft that a museum curator claimed is comparable in size to the real thing perched atop a rocket at a remote launch site in northwest China.

The display has been sitting there for three years, but at perhaps the most important time of its exhibition history, it is broken and visitors can no longer climb inside the "re-entry capsule".

Curators at the museum seemed oblivious that the manned space flight could take place in days and that fixing the capsule could help improve the museum's business.

No activities have been planned to mark the launch, curator Zheng Guodong said.

"Come to think of it, maybe we should do something," he said.

Many people who had heard of the upcoming launch, however, said sending a Chinese into space would be good for China and its people.

"This will demonstrate our country's strength, like our testing of the atomic bomb," said Li Jinghong, a 29-year-old woman.

"If a country is strong, its people can lift up their heads. Otherwise people will look down on us."

Wu Shuang, a college graduate, agreed: "Foreigners will think Chinese people are tough. They won't dare to bully us anymore."

But voices of dissent clearly exist.

"China has no military threat. We don't need to do this," said Liu Nan, 23.

"The clearest evidence of whether a country is strong or not is its people's living standards. There are people in China who still don't have enough to eat and can't afford to go to school. Money is limited. We should use it to help the people."

Cynicism and criticism also spewed from Internet chatrooms.

"Is it all for our (communist) party's glory? The value is not high. Britain, France can do it, but they didn't," wrote one netizen.

SPACE.WIRE