Griffin told a Senate subcommittee on science and space during a hearing in Washington DC last Tuesday that he was looking forward to the visit.

Griffin said that the United States needs both good partners and competitors in space exploration, and sometimes they can be both a competitor and a partner.

Zhang said as with other countries, China and the United States can co-operate in areas including deep space exploration, commercial satellite launches and manned space flights.

"So far as technology is concerned, we will respect each other's intellectual property rights," he said.

Zhang, also deputy chief commander of China's Manned Space Programme, said that technological innovation has enabled China to "spend less money but achieve more" in its manned space programme.

The country has earmarked around 20 billion yuan (US$2.47 billion) for its manned space programme since it was initiated in 1992, catapulting China into the exclusive space club that three years ago housed only the former Soviet Union and the United States.

The spending paled when compared with the cost of the US Appollo Programme, which totalled US$25 billion, spent between 1962 and 1972.

In addition to building ground facilities, half of China's expenditure has been allocated to the rocket and spacecraft systems, both of which were developed by Zhang's company, the Study Times weekly reported this week.

Theoretically, the more tests and trial launches are made, the higher success rate for both rockets and spacecraft.

With painstaking technological brainstorming, Chinese scientists have applied 55 new technologies, including innovative solutions for fault detection and escape systems, on the Long March 2F rocket the carrier of China's spacecraft, raising its reliability rate from 91 per cent for unmanned launches to 97 per cent for manned missions, Zhang said.

The overall safety rate reached a staggering 99.7 per cent, he said.

Space innovations have been increasingly applied to national economic development, Zhang said.

Between 1999 and 2005, China successfully launched two manned and four unmanned space missions atop the Long March 2F rockets.

(China Daily 05/04/2006 page1)