Yang Liwei Becomes China's First Astronaut

In October 2003, Yang Liwei, a lieutenant colonel in the People's Liberation Army Air Force, orbited the Earth aboard the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft and returned safely after about 21 hours in flight. His mission made China the third country, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to put a person into orbit using its own launch vehicle and spacecraft. It marked the start of a crewed space program that has since grown into a permanent presence in orbit.

China's ambitions in space dated back to the 1950s, when the rocket scientist Qian Xuesen, who had worked in the United States, helped lay the foundations of the nation's missile and space efforts. An early crewed program in the early 1970s, known as Project 714, was abandoned. The effort was revived in 1992 as Project 921, a secret-then-public plan to build a crewed spacecraft. Shenzhou's design drew on the Soviet-era Soyuz, with Russian assistance in areas such as life-support and docking technology, but it was larger and was developed as a Chinese system. Several uncrewed test flights, beginning in 1999, preceded the crewed attempt.

Yang, born in Liaoning province and trained as a fighter pilot, was chosen from a small group of candidates trained at the Astronaut Research and Training Center near Beijing. Shenzhou 5 lifted off atop a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Over the flight he completed 14 orbits, and the capsule landed in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Chinese state media broadcast the mission widely, and Yang was received as a national hero. Accounts of the flight, including his own later remarks, mention some vibration during the ascent, though the mission was regarded as a success.

The flight was as much a statement of national capability and prestige as a scientific undertaking, and it was celebrated in China as evidence of technological maturity. Later missions built on it quickly. Shenzhou 6 carried two astronauts in 2005, Zhai Zhigang performed China's first spacewalk in 2008, and the Tiangong space laboratories tested docking in the early 2010s. In 2022 China completed the Tiangong space station, which hosts rotating crews.

Yang later became a senior official in the space program and a public figure, and he has taken part in education and outreach. China remains excluded from the International Space Station, partly because of U.S. legislation restricting cooperation, which has pushed it to develop an independent path in orbit. His 2003 flight is therefore seen as the opening chapter of that independent effort.