Tang Hongbo

Tang Hongbo was born in October 1975 into a farming family in Xiangtan, Hunan province, and joined the People's Liberation Army Air Force in 1995, serving as a fighter pilot before being selected in 2010 for China's second group of astronauts. His path to orbit was not effortless — weightlessness training proved a genuine early obstacle, one he overcame only through repeated practice and stubborn adjustment — and he waited more than a decade after selection before finally flying. When his moment came, it placed him at the very start of a new era for China in space.

Tang launched on Shenzhou 12 on 17 June 2021 as part of the first crew ever to occupy the Tiangong space station, joining commander Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming for a 92-day expedition. On 4 July 2021 he and Liu Boming stepped outside to perform the first extravehicular activity from the new station, working for several hours to install equipment and raise a panoramic camera on the Tianhe core module — a foundational task that set the template for the many spacewalks to follow. Two years later Tang returned as commander of Shenzhou 17, launched on 26 October 2023, becoming the first taikonaut to revisit Tiangong and, in doing so, setting the record for the shortest interval between crewed missions by a Chinese astronaut. During that roughly six-month stay his crew carried out pioneering extravehicular repair work, addressing damage to the station's solar arrays caused by tiny debris impacts — the first such in-orbit maintenance of its kind for the program.

By the end of his Shenzhou 17 flight Tang had logged some 279 days in space across his two long-duration missions, a figure that briefly stood as the Chinese record for total spaceflight time before being surpassed later in 2024. Honored as a Heroic Astronaut and a recipient of the Spaceflight Merit Medal, he remains an active member of the corps. Tang's career neatly traces the station's own coming-of-age: he helped conduct its very first spacewalk when it was a single module, then returned to command a crew keeping a fully built, three-module complex healthy and productive — and has spoken of his hope to lead still-longer expeditions aboard Tiangong.