From the Associated Press:
China’s military-backed space program has selected 45 astronaut candidates, including its first women hopefuls, for a training program less than a year after the country completed its first spacewalk.
The 30 male and 15 female candidates are part of a program to pick five men and two women astronauts to participate in three more manned missions planned before 2012. The missions are to prepare for the rendezvous and docking tasks required for constructing a space station, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday.
In 2003, China become the first Asian country to put its own astronauts into space. It followed last year with its first spacewalk, putting the country closer to building a space station and landing a man on the moon.
See also past CDT posts on the space program.
