'China catching up with US in space tech'

June 17, 2012 15:49

With China poised to establish its own space lab after successful launch of its manned mission to experiment manual space docking, a leading Chinese scientist has said the technological gap between China and advanced countries like US is narrowing.

"The technological disparity is narrowing fast," Lu Xinguang, designer of the control system of the upgraded Long March-2F rocket, that safely propelled Shenzhou-9, carrying China's first woman astronaut astronauts into space, said. "The speed of development grows increasingly fast, which means some gaps might have needed 50 years to close in the past, but only 10 years in the future," he told state-run Xinhua news agency.

An example of this pace can be seen in comparing the technical leaps forward that China needed to make in launching the unmanned Shenzhou-8 spacecraft and orbiting space lab module Tiangong-1, and now Shenzhou-9.

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