Yang Liwei

Yang Liwei was born on 21 June 1965 in Suizhong County, in China's northeastern Liaoning province. He enlisted in the People's Liberation Army in 1983 and trained at an air force flight academy, graduating in 1987 to become a fighter pilot. Over the following years he accumulated more than 1,300 hours of flight time and rose to a senior rank in the PLA Air Force. In 1998, chosen from among some 1,500 candidates, he was selected for China's first group of taikonauts, entering a rigorous and secretive training program for the country's nascent crewed spaceflight effort. After five years of preparation he was picked from the final shortlist to fly China's first human mission.

On 15 October 2003, Yang lifted off aboard Shenzhou 5 atop a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. Over a flight lasting a little more than 21 hours he circled the Earth 14 times before his capsule descended by parachute onto the grasslands of Inner Mongolia the next day. The single orbital flight, modest in duration, carried enormous weight: it made China only the third nation, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to independently launch a human into orbit. Yang carried the flags of the People's Republic of China and the United Nations with him, and he later described a mysterious knocking sound he heard against the capsule wall, a phenomenon Chinese engineers eventually attributed to structural flexing under changing pressure. His account of the mission, recorded in his memoir, gave the public a rare firsthand look inside China's guarded space program.

Yang instantly became a national hero, honored with the title Space Hero and celebrated as the face of a program that had at last put a Chinese citizen in orbit. Though he never flew again, his influence on China's human spaceflight enterprise grew rather than faded: he moved into leadership and management, helping shape the training of the taikonauts who followed him to Shenzhou missions and, later, to the Tiangong space station, and later serving as a deputy chief designer of the crewed program. He remains a prominent figure in China's space effort, an advocate for a permanent Chinese presence in space and for crewed missions to the Moon, and a symbol of the moment his country joined the small club of spacefaring nations.