China’s first man in space Yang Liwei officially retires from active duty

South China Morning Post · Feb 16, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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China’s first man in space, Yang Liwei, has officially retired from active duty, but he has not stopped training and remains ready to don a spacesuit again if needed.He said in a CCTV interview on Saturday that the country’s first group of astronauts had been grounded in October according to regulations, but “if our motherland needs us, we can resume flights”.Yang, now a deputy chief designer for China’s crewed space programme, was the first Chinese national to reach Earth’s orbit in 2003.On October 15 of that year, he blasted off aboard the Shenzhou-5 spacecraft on a Long March-2F rocket, just 16 hours after he was told that he had been selected for the mission from a shortlist of three astronauts, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).During the Shenzhou-5 mission, Yang spent 21 hours in space, orbiting the Earth 14 times.It was a turning point for the nation’s human space flight programme, which began in 1992, and made China the third country to independently send humans into space.