A top aerospace official said Thursday that China expects to stage its first manned space flight in 2003, the China Daily reported Friday.
This is the first time China's space authority has explicitly promised to forge ahead with its plan of sending astronauts into orbit since the Columbia tragedy on February 1, said the paper.
"China put into place its space program long ago, and it will stick to its schedule without being distracted," Zhang Qingwei, president of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., told the paper in an exclusive interview Thursday.
Zhang said the assessments from the previous four unmanned test space flights between November 1999 and January 2003 had basically given the go-ahead for China to proceed to manned missions.