China launched its fifth Beidou orbiter into space on Sunday morning, moving it one step closer to its goal of building a navigation and positioning satellite network.

The Beidou, or Compass, system is being built to rival the US-developed GPS, the European Union's Galileo and Russia's Global Navigation Satellite System. It can allow travelers, drivers and military officials to know their locations.

The fifth orbiter was launched on top of a Long March 3A carrier rocket at 5:30 AM on Sunday from Xichang of Southwest China's Sichuan province.

It is the third Compass satellite launched this year, following launches on Jan 17 and June 2.

The short interval of less than two months since the last launch demonstrated that "the country is stepping into a busy period of launching the Compass satellites", an unnamed official in charge of the project said last month.

The first two orbiters were launched in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

Sun Jiadong, the Beidou program's chief designer, said on June 21 in a TV interview that China would launch 13 to 15 Beidou navigation satellites into orbit by 2012 to form a network that provides regional service covering the neighboring areas.

And in about 10 years, the network would be expanded to include more than 30 satellites covering the globe, he said.

The system is a crucial part of the country's space infrastructure for providing navigation and positioning services in transportation, meteorology, petroleum prospecting, forest fire monitoring, disaster forecasting, telecommunications and public security.

In addition, a global positioning system is crucial to any country's national security and defense, said Ran Chengqi, an official in charge of the program, referring to the fact that the US initially built its GPS system for military purposes.

It is unimaginable for China to go without such a system, he said.

Earlier reports cited Song Xiaojun, a Beijing-based military expert, as saying that 90 percent of the world's current weapons systems need a global positioning system.

(China Daily August 2, 2010)