Fei Junlong

Fei Junlong was born on 5 May 1965 in Jiangsu Province, China, to a farming family. Recruited into the People's Liberation Army Air Force as a young man, he trained as a fighter pilot and went on to serve as a flight instructor and flight-technology inspector, roles that demanded meticulous judgment about aircraft safety — a subject he cared about enough to later co-author a report on aviation safety. In January 1998 he was chosen from among more than a thousand elite pilots as one of the founding members of China's first astronaut corps, joining the small group that would carry the country's crewed spaceflight ambitions.

Fei's first spaceflight came on 12 October 2005, when he commanded Shenzhou 6 with Nie Haisheng as his crewmate. It was China's second crewed mission and its first to carry two people for a multi-day stay, keeping the pair in orbit for nearly five days and demonstrating that Chinese taikonauts could live and work in space rather than simply reach it. Seventeen years then passed before his second flight — a remarkable span of patience and continued readiness. On 29 November 2022 he launched again as commander of Shenzhou 15, this time bound for the newly completed Tiangong space station. His crew carried out the station's first full in-orbit crew handover, overlapping with the departing Shenzhou 14 team, and over roughly six months in orbit the crew performed a record four spacewalks for a single Chinese mission, together exceeding twenty-seven hours outside the station as they installed equipment and prepared Tiangong for expanded science operations. Fei returned to Earth on 4 June 2023.

With two missions spanning nearly two decades of China's rise as a spacefaring nation, Fei Junlong stands as one of the most experienced veterans of the taikonaut corps — a bridge between the pioneering Shenzhou 6 flight and the era of a permanently crewed Chinese station. Decorated as a Spaceflight Hero and with the Aerospace Achievement Medal, he has become a public advocate for aviation safety and a role model for Chinese youth in science and engineering. He remains an active member of the astronaut corps, and has spoken of his hope to help build and sustain China's permanent human presence in low Earth orbit aboard Tiangong.