The Long March II F rocket carrying the capsule blasted into clear skies from the remote Gobi desert in north China's Inner Mongolia at 9:00 amfor a 21-hour flight that will see it orbit the Earth 14 times.

The spaceship went into a preset orbit 10 minutes after it took off to make China just the third country after the United States and the former Soviet Union to put a man in space.

"The launch went very smoothly, things went real well for them," James Oberg, a 22-year veteran at the US National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) mission control in Houston, Texas, told AFP.

"We have a saying at NASA, 'The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war', meaning that the Chinese have practiced and prepared very energetically for this launch and I expect the re-entry and return of the astronaut to go without a hitch."

The successful mission will only be the beginning of an ambitious Chinese manned space program, said Oberg, with the Shenzhou capsule becoming a work horse space ship that will send probes to the moon and help build a permanent Chinese space station.

"In the next missions, I expect China will begin practicing docking techniques and getting their group of 14 astronauts experience in space," he said.

Within a couple of years, Oberg expects China to begin sending up civilian engineers, physicists and doctors as it masters space technology and begins to cooperate internationally with more satellite launches and possibly participate in the International Space Station.

Morris Jones, a space analyst at Australia's Wollongong University, said it was astounding that it took 40 years for a third country to finally join the elite club of manned space flight.

"It's an amazing achievement to be the only third nation with a human space capacity," he said.

"I expect the mission to be a complete success. I expect to see the astronaut return tomorrow morning in a fit state and very, very happy."

Russia's Yuri Gargarin was the first man in space, making his historic flight in April 1961, followed by the American Alan Shepard a month later. Since then scores of Russians and Americans have flown in space.

The Shenzhou's retro-rockets are expected to fire over a Chinese tracking station in Namibia in southern Africa on its 14th orbit in the early hours of Thursday morning and will undergo a fiery re-entry into the earth's atmosphere over Pakistan.

China has lofty ambitions for its space program and has said it hopes to launch a space probe capable of orbiting the moon by 2005 or 2006, which would be the nation's first lunar mission and would eventually lead to a landing on the moon by an unmanned craft.

SPACE.WIRE