Shenzhou 5

At nine o'clock on the morning of 15 October 2003, a Long March 2F ignited at Jiuquan Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert, and a 38-year-old fighter pilot named Yang Liwei rode it away from Earth, alone. No Chinese citizen had ever flown to space. The country had waited through decades of secret rocket programs and eleven years of the modern crewed effort for this single morning, and a nation of 1.3 billion people waited for word that their first spacefarer was safely in orbit.

The ascent nearly broke him. As the rocket climbed, a low-frequency vibration set Yang's body resonating; he later wrote that for about 26 seconds everything inside him seemed to be shaking apart and he believed he might die. The oscillation faded, orbit came, and the mission settled into its plan. Circling at roughly 343 kilometres, Yang displayed the flags of China and the United Nations on his seventh orbit, spoke with his family, and wrote a sentence for history. Engineers later traced the launch vibration and tuned it out of subsequent rockets.

Shenzhou 5 orbited Earth 14 times in 21 hours and 23 minutes. At 6:23 on the morning of 16 October, the re-entry module thumped down on the grasslands of central Inner Mongolia, and Yang climbed out under his own power. Afterwards he calmly retired a national legend, reporting that he had not, in fact, been able to see the Great Wall from orbit. He also described hearing odd, unexplained knocking sounds against the hull, a mystery later attributed to the cabin structure flexing as pressure and temperature changed.

China became the third country, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to launch a human into orbit with its own rocket and spacecraft, 42 years after Gagarin. Yang Liwei became a national hero and the public face of a program that would advance with striking patience: a spacewalk within five years, a space laboratory within eight, and a permanently crewed station within two decades.