She’s out there somewhere.

Perhaps she’s teaching kids about Yang Liwei’s space flight at a primary school in Inner Mongolia.

Or, she’s a physically fit journalist traipsing around the globe covering Hu Jintao or Wen Jibao on their diplomatic travels. Maybe she’s a young surgeon honing her medical skills at a People’s Liberation Army outpost in Wuhan.

Wherever she is, she’s got one hell of a future.

By 2010, this special young woman will represent the world’s most populous nation in outer space as China’s first female astronaut. Overnight, she’ll become one of the most famous women on the planet.

Astronaut Yang Liwei, China’s first man in space, will take a step back, though he will always be respected and idolized for his marvelous courage as he blasted into the heavens for his nation last October.

According to the latest issue of Science Exploring Magazine, sources in the Chinese space programme have finally confirmed that, if all goes as planned, they hope to have the first Chinese woman astronaut orbiting the planet by 2010.

That’s not far off.

They say the selection process will start late next year or early in 2006. The women who will be selected as astronaut candidates will be selected from among “ordinary?women in the age group between 25 and 45, under the plan.

Yet they will be far from ordinary. Like the men who enter astronaut training, they will undergo a stringent selection process. It includes batteries of physical and psychological tests, with hundreds eliminated for every one candidate selected.

The women will receive three-to-five-years of training and demanding classroom education. It will be all-encompassing, with the women living at the Beijing space centre, with the candidates eating, drinking, and sleeping highly technical training and information.

They’ll gyrate in huge machines to test their bodies adaptability to lack of gravity, a sickening process. They’ll be dumped in pools to see if they can keep from drowning with all their heavy gear on.

The women will also be in the best physical shape of their lives, training like Olympians on daily runs and pumping iron to hone their muscles. Specialists will monitor their fitness and dietary regimens, according to each woman’s physiological characteristics. Doctors will prick their veins to take blood to make sure they stay healthy.

Their family lives will suffer. Kids won’t see their moms. Husbands and boy friends will sacrifice time away from their wives or lovers.

Many of the women, presumably, won’t be able to hack it. But that’s normal. Men selected can’t hack it either. It’s part of the process. The space programme only wants the best. It’s not a disgrace to fail. It’s a disgrace not to try.

Finally, after all that effort, a few women will have their lives altered forever, as they become experts in doing the job of space station researcher or payload specialists aboard a massive Shenzhou spaceship.

But one who has trained for what will have seemed like an eternity will rise to the top of the batch. She’ll shine above her peers, with the programme’s directors somehow concluding that she is the person who should represent 1.3 billion people on a special “first?in space.

But she won’t be the first woman to have bravely flown into space. In fact, she won’t be the first ethnic Chinese to have travelled. The US has sent other such women on missions, including some who given their lives for the cause of science and space.

Nonetheless, she’ll be the first female Chinese citizen to represent her nation in a special quest into space, and hundreds of millions of Chinese women everywhere will see her as a symbol of their hopes and dreams for China and women’s equality.

It will be a great day in the Pacific century we are now witnessing.

So, while it’s still a bit early, permit me to be the first to wish this special astronaut a good journey:

May the winds be fair. May the flying be good. And may your return be soft, safe and soon.

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