Planned Spacewalk Would Be Giant Leap for Chinese

China is set to become the third nation to send a human strolling through space this week, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The shuttle Shenzhou VII will launch tomorrow with a crew of three, one of whom will don a Chinese- or Russian-made spacesuit for the spacewalk, seen as another signal of China’s arrival among top-tier world powers.

"With the huge amount of money spent and the high-tech capacity, the two things will make the world believe that China is a developed country, not a developing country," says a Chinese university official of the effect of the spacewalk and this summer's Olympic Games. Experts say the ultimate goal of China's space program is a moon landing. (More China stories.)