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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (894)	10/1/2003 12:57:41 AM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

Wan Hu: China's 16th century astronaut Legendary Ming Dynasty official was space pioneer By Joe Havely CNN Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Posted: 7:32 AM EDT (1132 GMT) HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- The countdown has started, the capsule is ready and China is preparing sometime -- at least before the end of the year -- to launch its first man into space. If succesful, the launch will grant China entry to an elite club making it only the third nation after Russia and the United States capable of putting humans into space. Of course, as any space historian knows, Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. His 1961 flight aboard a Soviet Vostok space capsule, catapulted the former air force pilot into the history books and set alarm bells ringing in the Western world that the final frontier was about to turn a very communist shade of red. But was he really the first? Several centuries earlier -- legend says about 1500 AD, sometime around the middle of the Ming Dynasty -- a Chinese stargazer named Wan Hu dreamed of going where no man had gone before and set out to turn that dream into space age reality. According to the legend, Wan, a local government official, was obsessed by the stars and planned a rather harebrained scheme to get himself closer to them. Something of a nutty professor character, Wan set out to make himself the world's first astronaut. Picking up on China's recently developed expertise in rocketry, he took up the task of building himself a space ship. Centuries before the Wright brothers took to the air or the Germans launched their V1 and V2 rockets, Wan was convinced that the weapons of war could also be a means of transportation and his ticket to the stars. He was somewhat ahead of his time. Big bang Come the launch day, Wan dressed himself in his imperial finery, strapped himself in the chair and called upon his 47 servants, each armed with a flaming torch, to light the 47 fuses. Their job done, the servants speedily retreated to a safe distance ... and waited. What came next, the legend goes, was an enormous bang. When the smoke eventually cleared, Wan and his chair were nowhere to be seen. Whether Wan actually made it or not has never been made clear. The prognosis does seem a little doubtful. But despite the somewhat cranky nature of spacecraft he was certainly on the right track. Four-and-a-half centuries later and those same principles behind the first Chinese rockets did indeed lift Gagarin on his historic flight beyond Earth's gravity. And now expectations are high that modern China is set to follow suit, aiming to become only the third nation in history to launch a man into space and turn Wan Hu's centuries-old dream into reality. cnn.com