Beijing: China will go ahead with its first-ever manned space flight this year as scheduled, despite the Columbia space shuttle disaster which shook the scientific community across the world.

"China put into place its space programme long ago, and it will stick to its schedule without being distracted," Zhang Qingwei, president of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, said.

While conceding that the Columbia tragedy had sounded alarm bells for the aerospace industry, the top Chinese space official said it was important to learn from the incident, the state media reported on February 14.

This is the first time since the Columbia tragedy on February 1 that China's space authority has explicitly promised to forge ahead with its plan of sending astronauts into orbit.

"Technically, there is no direct link between China's manned space programme and US missions and China has developed an effective quality control system in rocket and spacecraft manufacturing, launching and scientific research,'' Zhang told China Daily.

However, it did not mention the schedule for the mission.

Zhang said it is important to learn from the incident and establish the cause of any problem that arose in the course of the space mission. Equally important is to decide if changes are necessary to fix the problem and what kind of counter-measures should be taken.

PTI