China will send its third manned mission into space this evening on a mission which will include its first space walk, the government said yesterday. The Shenzhou VII will lift off from the Jiuquan space centre in a remote desert area of the northwestern province of Gansu between 9.07 p.m. (1307 GMT) and 10.27 p.m. (1427 GMT), mission spokesman Wang Zhaoyao told a news conference.
Fuelling of the rocket has already begun, meaning the launch is "irreversible," the official Xinhua news agency said.
In October 2003, China became the third country to put a man in space with its own rocket, after the former Soviet Union and the US. It sent two more astronauts on a five-day flight on its Shenzhou VI craft next month. China named three men - Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng, all aged 42 - for the mission.
"All of this training has been a massive test of the health and psychology of us, the astronauts," Mr Jing said, in comments carried live on state television.
"We've overcome hardship, won over ourselves and challenged the extreme limits," he added, dressed in a blue jumpsuit and seated next to his two colleagues.
Last year, China sent its first lunar probe into orbit. China's longer-term goals include establishing a space station and landing on the moon.
On this mission, two of the three "taikonauts" - the Chinese name for astronaut, taken from the Mandarin word for "space" - will don suits ready for a space walk, spokesman Wang told a small group of Chinese and foreign reporters.
"One taikonaut will get out of the cabin and take back the test samples loaded outside the module," he added. "After the extra-vehicular activity is completed, the spacecraft will release a small monitoring satellite."
One taikonaut would wear a Chinese-made suit, and the other a Russian one, Mr Wang said, although it was not clear which would be used on the spacewalk.
"Extra-vehicular activity is a big leap for the manned space programme," he said. "The process cannot be simulated completely on the ground and some of the newly developed products are to be tested in flight for the first time."