14 DAY TRIAL // After the press conference that took place in the wake of the launch of the first Chinese lunar probe Chang'e 1 in October last year, during which a Chinese official stated that the Republic of China had no scheduled mission to send a man on the Moon, now the Chinese Space program picks up the speed and plans to launch its third mission that will take a man into space; and something tells me they are not doing it just for the fun of it.
The mission will also feature a spacewalk for the first time in the history of the Chinese Space program. According to the secretary general of the Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defense, Huang Qiang, China will launch a total of 15 rockets and about 17 satellites into space in the near future.
The Shenzhou 7 manned spacecraft will most likely carry three astronauts into space.
The Chinese government has been accused of staging the launch of the Shezhou 7 spacecraft with the Olympics, as both events will take place in the same day, i.e. 8th of August this year, taking into consideration the fact that both events are viewed by the Chinese people as a national pride. Not even the Chang'e 1 lunar orbiter escaped international scandal, as the first image it send back to Earth looked extremely similar to another picture of the Moon, taken by one of NASA's lunar orbiter only a few years before, and the Chinese government was accused of forgery.
A reliable source quoting Huang Qiang also reported that, during the whole Olympics competition, about 30 new innovative technologies would be used, amongst which the famous Olympic torch, meteorological predictions provided by recently launched satellites and security systems.
China has scheduled for launch another lunar probe, Chang'e 2, and a mission, Chang'e 3, which will mostly involve sending a manned vehicle to the surface of the Moon. However, China has denied that their objectives include sending a man to the moon, after revealing their plans in multiple occasions previous to the launch of the Chang'e 1 lunar probe. The Chinese nation became the third country in the world to send a man into Earth's orbit, after the Soviet Union and the U.S., and has recently embarked into a lunar exploration program aside a number of other countries. Thus, it seems that, this century, the surface of the Moon will probably be a rather 'crowded' place.