Liu Boming

Liu Boming was born in September 1966 in Yi'an County, Heilongjiang province, in China's far northeast, and rose through the People's Liberation Army Air Force as a fighter pilot before his life turned skyward in a more literal sense. In 1998 he was chosen for the very first group of China's astronaut corps, the same pioneering cohort that produced Yang Liwei and Zhai Zhigang, the men who would open the country's human spaceflight program. Liu trained for a decade before his first flight, waiting through the Shenzhou 5 and Shenzhou 6 missions as China proved it could put people into orbit and bring them home. His patience was rewarded with a place on one of the most historic crews in the nation's space history.

On 25 September 2008 Liu launched aboard Shenzhou 7 alongside commander Zhai Zhigang and Jing Haipeng, on China's third crewed flight and its first to carry three people. The mission's centerpiece was China's first-ever spacewalk. While Zhai floated free in the domestically built Feitian suit, Liu supported him from the open hatch of the orbital module, wearing a Russian Orlan-M suit, and performed a stand-up extravehicular activity of his own to hand Zhai a small Chinese flag to wave for the cameras — a moment watched by hundreds of millions on live television. The flight lasted just under three days but vaulted China into the small club of nations capable of an EVA. Thirteen years later Liu returned to space on Shenzhou 12, launched on 17 June 2021 as part of the first crew to inhabit the new Tiangong space station. Over a 92-day stay he carried out two spacewalks from the Tianhe core module, the first of them with crewmate Tang Hongbo on 4 July 2021 — the inaugural EVA from China's own station — installing equipment and raising panoramic cameras to outfit the outpost for the years of operation ahead.

With the spacewalks of Shenzhou 12 added to his Shenzhou 7 excursion, Liu accumulated roughly thirteen hours of extravehicular time across his career, which stood as a Chinese record in the wake of that 2021 mission. His two flights bracket the arc of China's ascent in space: from a single symbolic step outside a capsule in 2008 to the methodical construction of a permanently crewed station. Now a senior officer widely honored as a Spaceflight Hero, Liu remains an active member of the astronaut corps and a visible advocate for the EVA training and space-station science that his own missions helped pioneer, embodying the bridge between China's first tentative spacewalk and its mature orbital infrastructure.