For a few giddy seconds, as the space rocket and the launch towers come into view from our tour-bus window, it feels as if we have gone back in time to watch one of the legendary Apollo launches at the Kennedy Space Centre in the US state of Florida. The illusion is shattered as our guide hurries down the aisle and gives each of us a small yellow hand-towel and a bottle of water.
'This is just in case things go wrong and the rocket blows up,' he says with a smile. 'Just wet the towel and put it over your nose and mouth to protect yourselves from the fumes.' With those words, we are brought back down to earth with a bump; rather than Cape Canaveral in the 1960s, we are in Sichuan province in late autumn, this year, and on our way to witness a modern space launch with thoroughly Chinese characteristics.
However inadequate the towels might prove to be in the event of a catastrophe, the jitters surrounding the launch of the Chang'e I satellite are justified. In 1995, at the same launch site in Xichang, a Long March rocket carrying a commercial satellite went sideways like a poorly balanced firework and exploded into a hillside. It killed six people and injured 50.
One year later, at least 57 died when another Long March rocket did something even more catastrophic. This one vaulted nearby hills but landed on a mountain village. As investigations into the mishaps later discovered, neither were due to a miscalculation of fuel-to-weight ratios or telemetry intolerances. The rockets simply hadn't been welded together properly.
Reflecting on those disasters, I clutch my hand towel like a comfort blanket as our convoy of coaches makes its final ascent through winding country lanes lined with police and soldiers before drawing to a stop on a hilltop, a full 4km from the launch site. Two thousand people pour out of the buses and scramble underneath police cordons, jostling for the best vantage points as blast-off time draws closer.
Beyond a blank TV screen - which was set up to relay footage of the launch but is not working - a defining moment is about to be acted out in China's bold space programme; a programme that includes plans to put a robot on the moon in 2012 and undertake a manned landing by 2020. Wealthy space watchers from across China have paid 930 yuan each to see first-hand the launch of a probe that will spend a year circling, photographing and analysing the lunar surface.
