Liu Yang

Liu Yang was born on 6 October 1978, with family roots in Linzhou, Henan Province, coming of age as China's economic reforms opened new paths for a generation of ambitious young people. A strong student, she was recruited into the People's Liberation Army Air Force in 1997 and trained as a military transport pilot. She rose to become a deputy squadron leader flying cargo aircraft, logging some 1,680 flight hours — a career marked by an incident in which she safely brought down an aircraft after a bird strike, a moment of composure under pressure that came to define her reputation. In 2010 she was selected among China's second group of taikonauts, the first cohort to include women, positioning her for a role that would carry national symbolism far beyond the cockpit.

On 16 June 2012 Liu Yang launched aboard Shenzhou 9, becoming the first Chinese woman in space — a flight that came exactly 49 years to the day after Valentina Tereshkova's pioneering Vostok 6 mission. Serving as a mission specialist alongside commander Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang, she took part in China's first crewed docking, as Shenzhou 9 joined the Tiangong-1 experimental module in orbit; the crew performed both automated and manual dockings, and Liu oversaw a program of medical and biological experiments during the roughly 13-day flight. A decade later she returned to orbit on Shenzhou 14, launching on 5 June 2022 for a six-month expedition alongside commander Chen Dong and Cai Xuzhe. That mission was central to assembling the permanent Tiangong space station: Liu and her crewmates received and integrated the Wentian and Mengtian laboratory modules, commissioning the core science facilities of China's orbital outpost. On 1 September 2022 she ventured outside the station, becoming the second Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk, after Wang Yaping the previous year. Across her two missions she accumulated roughly 3,528 hours in space.

Liu Yang's flights made her one of the most recognizable figures in China's human spaceflight program and a durable symbol of women's participation in aerospace. Honored as a Spaceflight Hero and recipient of the Aerospace Merit Medal, she has used her prominence to advocate for women's advancement in technical fields and for public science education, later taking on public roles including service in the National People's Congress and leadership within the All-China Women's Federation. She remains an active member of China's astronaut corps, an experienced long-duration flyer whose career spans the arc from China's first tentative space-station docking to the fully operational Tiangong station. Reflecting on the honor of her first flight, she said she felt she was flying "on behalf of hundreds of millions of female Chinese citizens" — a statement that captured both the personal and national weight of her journey.