Tim Furniss/LONDON
CHINESE PILOTS are to start training as cosmonauts at Russia's Star City, near Kaliningrad, in October, for flights to the Mir 1 space station.
Russia has also sold China a space-station life-support system and will supply rocket-engine technology, says Rex Hall, the London-based authority on the Russian manned space programme.
Two Chinese candidates for one Mir 1 flight will be selected after the two-year course has been completed, and one will conduct the mission in about 1998.
Other Mir flights are possible, as Russia plans to keep the station operational until 2000, despite the planned inauguration of the International Space Station in late 1997 (Flight International, 24-30 April).
Reports about a Chinese manned space programme have been circulating for several years, but indications from Star City are that the Mir flight is part of a space-experience programme, which will lead to a Chinese-launched manned space flight mission after 2000, using a recoverable capsule.
China has accumulated re-entry and recovery data, from several flights and safe landings, of unmanned remote-sensing and micro-gravity spacecraft.
The next manned flight to the Mir, meanwhile, now scheduled for launch on 17 August, is to be watched by a large delegation of Chinese officials who are afterwards expected to sign the Mir flight agreement.
The Soyuz TM24, carrying Russian cosmonauts Gennadi Manakov and Pavel Vinogradev, will be launched at 13.17GMT. The TM24 will also carry French researcher Claudie Andre-Deshays on a 14-day commercial mission.
Deshays will return to the Kazakhstan landing zone aboard the TM23, with cosmonauts Yuri Onufrienko and Yuri Usachev, at 10.15GMT on 2 September, leaving the Russian TM24 crew and NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid aboard the Mir.
Source: Flight International
