China waxes lyrical over moon mission pictures

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese leaders hailed images sent back from the country's first lunar satellite on Monday, saying they showed their nation had thrust itself into the front ranks of global technological powers.

Premier Wen Jiabao, visiting the scientists who have guided the lunar probe Chang'e 1 into space and around the moon, proclaimed the mission a complete success.

"The full success of our country's first lunar exploration mission is helping to turn the Chinese nation's 1,000-year old dream of reaching the moon a reality," Wen said.

State television showed the orbiter broadcasting into space "The East is Red," the Communist Party's old anthem to a rising China, when Wen visited. The revolutionary tune was also broadcast by China's first satellite in 1970.

The picture on the Xinhua Web site (www.xinhuanet.com) showed a patch of grey moon surface splotched with craters.

Even as hundreds of millions of Chinese struggle in rural hardship, the ruling Communist Party is committed to clambering into the select ranks of global space powers, and Chang'e 1's journey has been accompanied by a stream of patriotic propaganda.

In 2003, China became only the third country to put a man into space using its own rocket after the former Soviet Union and the United States. It then sent two astronauts on a five-day flight on its Shenzhou VI rocket in October 2005.

China plans to launch its third manned rocket, Shenzhou VII, into space in October 2008 and may send an astronaut on a space walk, a Shanghai paper said.

But a space official downplayed plans to put a man on the moon.