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.
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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.
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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.
