The Shenzhou VII spacecraft is due to be launched on Thursday [EPA]

Chinese space technicians have begun final preparations for the country's third manned space flight.

The mission, due to blast off from the Jiuquan launch site in western China on Thursday, is expected to see one of the astronauts on board leave the capsule for what will be China's first spacewalk.

The Shenzhou VII capsule, carried a top a Long March II-F rocket, is due to orbit the Earth for about 60 hours, and will for the first time carry the spacecraft's full complement of three astronauts.

China's leader see the space programme as important for national pride [EPA]

According to government statements, Zhai Zhigang, a 42-year-old colonel in the Chinese air force will make the historic spacewalk either on Friday or Saturday.

He will be wearing China's first domestically-designed and made space suit. Previous Chinese missions have used Russian spacesuits.

State media reports have said the spacewalk will be broadcast live on national television, using a camera inside a special microsatellite carried on the spacecraft.

Accompanying Zhai will be two other air force pilots, Liu Boming and Jing
Haipeng, both of whom are also 42.

China's space programme is closely tied with the military and shrouded in secrecy, but the government has insisted on several occasions that its aims for space are purely peaceful.

Military fears

Nonetheless Japan, the US and China's biggest neighbour India, among others, have all expressed fears that China's advances in space will have a military application.

China's ambitious space effort aims to put a man on the moon by 2020 [AFP]

Those concerns spiked in January last year when China successfully destroyed one of its own obsolete weather satellites using a missile fired from Earth.

Political analysts say China's communist leaders have been keen to use the country's achievements in space as a demonstration of economic and technological progress under their rule.

"It's all about politics," Dr Morris Jones, an Australian-based space analyst who has followed the Chinese space programme, said.

He said the timing of the launch was particularly significant with the government eager to "capitalise on the success and publicity surrounding their recent hosting of the Olympic games."

In October 2003 China became only the third country after the US and Russia capable of sending humans into space.

Since then it has sent only one other manned flight aloft, carrying two astronauts on a week-long mission in 2005.

Moon mission

On the surface this might seem like slow progress, but analysts say the Shenzhou VII launch is the latest stage in an ambitious and highly-calculated manned space programme.

The next launch is expected to take place in 2010, and according to reports will see the deployment of an orbiting space laboratory.

That will be followed by construction of a fully-fledged space station and, by 2020, a Chinese astronaut landing on the moon.

The head of Nasa, the US space administration, has said that could well mean the Chinese will beat the US back to the moon.

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