Chen Dong

Chen Dong was born in December 1978 in Luoyang, Henan province, and built a career as a PLA Air Force fighter pilot, rising to the rank of colonel before his selection as a taikonaut in 2010 among China's second group of astronauts. Inspired, like so many of his generation, by Yang Liwei's landmark 2003 flight, he trained for six years before earning a seat on his first mission — and once he began flying, he flew often and long, becoming one of the most experienced members of China's corps in a remarkably short span.

His debut came on Shenzhou 11, launched on 17 October 2016, when he and Jing Haipeng docked with the Tiangong-2 space laboratory and lived aboard for roughly a month, then China's longest crewed mission to date. Chen returned in a far weightier role on Shenzhou 14, launched 5 June 2022, this time as commander. Over a six-month expedition his crew oversaw one of the defining chapters of the program: the arrival and integration of the Wentian and Mengtian laboratory modules, completing the three-module assembly of the Tiangong station and conducting several spacewalks to outfit the growing complex. In April 2025 Chen commanded a third mission, Shenzhou 20, another long-duration flight to Tiangong. That expedition ended dramatically in November 2025 when suspected orbital-debris damage to the crew's own return spacecraft led mission controllers to bring Chen and his crewmates home aboard the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft instead — a real-world demonstration of the rescue-and-rotation contingencies China had built into its station operations.

Across those three flights Chen accumulated well over 400 cumulative days in orbit, making him the first Chinese astronaut to cross that threshold and the national record-holder for total time in space. He also ranks among China's most prolific spacewalkers, with multiple EVAs and many hours of extravehicular work to his name over his commands. Decorated as a Heroic Astronaut and a recipient of the Spaceflight Merit Medal, Chen remains an active taikonaut and a mentor to newer batches of the corps. His steadily lengthening logbook mirrors the station's own maturation from a single core module into a fully assembled, continuously crewed laboratory, and he has spoken of his ambition to keep pushing China's endurance records higher still.