Shenzhou 1

Nothing was announced beforehand. In the pre-dawn darkness of 20 November 1999, at 6:30 a.m. Beijing time, a brand-new rocket ignited at the Jiuquan launch centre deep in the Gobi Desert, carrying a spacecraft almost no one outside the program had seen. Only once the mission succeeded did state media reveal its name: Shenzhou, the Divine Vessel. China had quietly flown the first test of a ship designed to carry its own astronauts into orbit.

The schedule had been brutal. Project 921, the human-spaceflight program secretly approved in 1992, faced a goal of flying before the new millennium, so engineers took a capsule originally built for ground electrical tests and refitted it for orbit. Shenzhou borrowed the proven three-module layout of Russia's Soyuz but was larger and extensively redesigned, and the Long March 2F beneath it was a new human-rated rocket making its maiden flight. Ten minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft separated cleanly into its planned orbit.

For 21 hours and 11 minutes the ground network rehearsed everything a crewed flight would demand, with tracking stations across China and Yuan Wang ships stationed in distant oceans. After 14 orbits, the tracking ship Yuan Wang 3, holding position off the coast of Namibia, transmitted the reentry command. The capsule fired its retros, survived the fiery descent, and parachuted onto the Inner Mongolian grassland at 3:41 a.m. on 21 November, about 415 kilometres east of where it had launched.

Three more uncrewed Shenzhou flights refined life support, landing precision, and escape systems. Then, on 15 October 2003, Yang Liwei rode Shenzhou 5 into orbit, and China became the third nation capable of launching humans into space on its own. Every Chinese crew since, through today's Tiangong space station expeditions, has flown on the same Shenzhou and Long March 2F pairing first proven on that November morning in 1999.