Malaysians watched with pride yesterday as their country's first astronaut blasted off aboard a Russian rocket, bound for the International Space Station - vowing as a Muslim to keep praying and fasting in space.
Television networks showed a live broadcast of Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor lifting off in a Soyuz-FG rocket, adorned with a Malaysian flag, from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"This is truly a historic moment for all Malaysians," King Mizan Zainal Abi-din said, adding that Shukor’s voyage would help the country "attain further progress in science, technology and innovation."
Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and more than a thousand Malaysians, including eager schoolchildren, held a special ceremony to pray for the astronaut’s safety.
They clapped and cheered as a giant TV screen at a Kuala Lumpur convention hall showed scenes of Shukor smiling inside the spacecraft minutes after the liftoff.
Shukor is being accompanied by American Peggy Whitson and Russian Yuri Malen-chenko on his trip - which includes about nine days on the station to conduct scientific experiments.
Malaysian newspapers yesterday devoted several pages and published special pullouts about the mission, which coincides with the last days of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn until sundown.
Shukor wrote in his Web journal on Tuesday that he "definitely would be praying and fasting in space," even though Malaysian clerics decreed he can be excused from fasting.
Shukor, a 35-year-old physician, beat more than 11,000 applicants in a nationwide search that began in 2003 to be Malaysia's first astronaut.
On his journey he is taking vacuum-packed Malaysian food, including skewered chicken, banana rolls, fermented soybean cakes and ginger jelly, to mark Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, in space.
（英语点津 Linda 编辑）
About the broadcaster:
Marc Checkley is a freelance journalist and media producer from Auckland, New Zealand. Marc has had an eclectic career in the media/arts, most recently working as a radio journalist for NewstalkZB, New Zealand’s leading news radio network, as a feature writer for Travel Inc, New Nutrition Business (UK) and contributor for Mana Magazine and the Sunday Star Times. Marc is also a passionate arts educator and is involved in various media/theatre projects in his native New Zealand and Singapore where he is currently based. Marc joins the China Daily with support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation.
