China's first manned spaceship, Shenzhou V, is more comfortable and has more functions than those developed by Russia and the United States, a senior officer with China's manned space program said in Beijing Thursday.

Xie Mingbao, director of the manned space program office, told a press conference organized by the State Council Information Office that although Chinese experts have learned much from their Russian counterparts in spaceship designing, Shenzhou V is not a replica of Russia's spacecraft and it is more comfortable for astronaut and has more functions.

Shenzhou V, the largest of its kind in the world, had an orbit module designed to remain in orbit for longer time to conduct scientific experiments, Xie said.

The officer said that the successful launch and landing of Shenzhou V indicates that China has made breakthroughs and mastered the know-how of manned spaceship and accomplished the objectives set for the first step of manned space flight program, making China the third nation in the world that has sent a human into space," said Xie.

Xie cited the precision landing point of the re-entry module, which is only 4.8 kilometers away from the planned spot.

Xie described China's first spaceman Yang Liwei as "astonishingly wonderful."

In reply to a question of why live TV show was not made on the launch and landing, Xie said that live show or not is not directly associated with the success or not of the space launch and what we concerned about most is how to organize well the launch and ensure its success, adding that "we were fully confident of the success of the mission before the launch and facts have testified to it."

Xie gave a detailed account of the return and landing of the spaceship. He said that the ground command fed the return data to the spaceship when it was orbiting the Earth for the last time and the spaceship began to execute the return orders when it reached the space over the southwestern part of Africa. It first turned about 90 degrees to leave the orbital capsule and it turned about another 90 degrees to reverse its position and started the braking engine to reduce speed. When it reached about 145 kilometers from the Earth, it jettisoned the propulsion module before the reentry module entered the atmosphere. When it reached a point about 10 kilometers above the Earth, it released a huge parachute that measures 1,200 square meters. When it reached about one meter from the ground, the buffer engines were started to reduce the speed to2-3 meters per second to cushion the landing impact.

Shenzhou V, measuring 9.2 meters in length and weighing 7,790 kilograms, consists of the orbit, re-entry and propulsion modules.

After the successful launch, the spaceship was put under the monitoring by a global tracking network, including land-based command and control stations and sea-based tracking fleet, Xie said.

Xie revealed that China spent 18 billion yuan (US$2.17 billion) on its space program initiated in 1992, with each test prior to Shenzhou V costing less than one billion yuan (US$120 million).

(Xinhua News Agency October 16, 2003)