China's First Spacewalk 148
Smivs writes "The BBC reports that China will launch its third manned space mission in late September, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
The Shenzhou VII flight will feature
China's first-ever space walk, which will be broadcast live with cameras inside and outside the spacecraft.
For the spacewalk, two crew members will go into the spacecraft's vacuum module. One yuhangyuan (astronaut) will carry out the spacewalk; the other is there to monitor the activity and assist in case of an emergency.
Two types of spacesuits — one made in China, the other from Russia — will be carried up on the flight.
It is unclear why China has opted for two different types of spacesuit.
Spaceflight analyst Dr Morris Jones commented that China might want to test the suits against each other. Alternatively, he said, it might not be ready or willing to fly a mission exclusively with its own suits."
Smart testing (Score:5, Interesting)
China is fast tracking their progress in space, and they're doing pretty good risk management to get it done. They used Russian experience when designing their capsule system (their spacecraft has a number of big similarities to the Soyuz capsule, very very big similarities, and now they're taking up a backup suit in case a design flaw appears during the test that would affect a rescuer. It's a fine idea and doesn't indicate some big uncertainty about their own design, it shows a clear headed decision to trade a possible nationalistic PR win for a measured, risk aware backup plan that puts the lives of their Taikonauts ahead of the usual spin goals.
I'm not a huge fan of PRC in general, but their space program has been well executed so far. They're making good use of available data while still innovating on their terms instead of having to build everything from scratch.
An astronaut by any other name... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why does the media use foreign names for astronauts from other countries? We've got cosmonaut and now "yuhangyuan"? That's ridiculous. Is "astronaut" somehow reserved for only US spacefarers? I think this whole thing is a leftover from the cold war, where it was somehow insulting to use the same terminology for Soviet and US astronauts, probably because of the fierce competition.
On another note, if the astronauts don't leave the confines of their ship, and merely evacuate all the air, is that really a "space walk"?
Re:State run media? (Score:2, Interesting)
True, most live events have a delay, I believe the moon mission had a 5 minute (about) delay. The difference was this delay was because of the ol' laws of physics. With China...It may be for a different reason. As an example, I believe that China's first manned mission was not shown until it had actually lifted off, then all the channels switched to the "Breaking news story!" to show it rocketing upwards. I recall something about that, but of course, I could be wrong.