NPR's Carl Castle this morning reported on China's announcement that it plans to send a man into space by the end of the year. (Sorry, no links -- it's old news anyway.)

At the end of the piece, he said something to the effect of "The astronauts will be referred to using the Mandarin word for 'space', as 'taikonauts'."

Huh?

I thought that was a Western/Anglophone neologism, and that the Chinese actually refer to their astronauts as "yuhangyuan"?