Yang Liwei, the first Chinese citizen to reach space, has officially retired from active duty — a milestone that closes the opening chapter of one of the most consequential space programmes of the 21st century and invites a reckoning with how far China has come since a single taikonaut rode a modified ballistic missile into orbit 22 years ago.
The retirement, confirmed by the South China Morning Post, marks the formal end of an era for China's human spaceflight programme.
The Mission That Changed Everything
On 15 October 2003, Yang Liwei launched aboard Shenzhou 5 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. He orbited Earth 14 times over 21 hours and 23 minutes before landing safely on the steppes of Inner Mongolia. With that single flight, China became only the third nation in history — after the Soviet Union and the United States — to independently launch a human being into orbit.
The engineering achievement was genuine and substantial. The Shenzhou spacecraft, while drawing conceptual heritage from the Soviet Soyuz design, incorporated significant Chinese engineering and represented a domestic industrial capability that China had built largely from scratch over the preceding decade. Yang's calm, professional conduct during the mission — and the iconic image of him holding a small national flag in the capsule window — made him an immediate symbol of what the programme had accomplished.
He was 38 years old at launch, selected as a taikonaut candidate in 1998 from a pool of 1,500 military pilots. His selection and training reflected the same methodical, systems-level approach that would come to characterise the entire Chinese human spaceflight effort in the years that followed.
Twenty-Two Years of Relentless Progress
What Yang Liwei's single mission set in motion is now a fully operational crewed space station programme. The Tiangong station — China's third attempt at a permanent orbital outpost, following the smaller Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 modules — has hosted continuous crewed operations since 2021. The station's three-module configuration, anchored by the Tianhe core module, supports rotating crews of three taikonauts on six-month tours, with plans to expand capacity in the coming years.
The distance from Shenzhou 5 to Tiangong is not measured in years alone but in accumulated capability. China now operates the Long March 2F crew launch vehicle with a strong reliability record, a dedicated cargo resupply system through the Tianzhou spacecraft, a domestically developed extravehicular activity spacesuit, and a taikonaut corps that has grown to include women and civilian scientists alongside military pilots.
Parallel to human spaceflight, China's robotic exploration programme has achieved landings on the Moon — including the far side, a first for any nation — and on Mars, where the Zhurong rover operated in Utopia Planitia. Lunar sample return missions have brought back materials from both near-side and far-side locations, with the Chang'e 6 mission delivering the first-ever samples from the lunar far side in 2024.
What Retirement Represents
For Yang Liwei personally, retirement ends a career spanning the entire arc of Chinese human spaceflight from ambition to routine operation. He served in senior institutional roles within the China Manned Space Agency following his 2003 flight, helping shape training programmes and mission planning for the taikonauts who followed. His institutional knowledge is, by any measure, irreplaceable — though China's programme is now mature enough that it no longer depends on any single individual.
His departure also coincides with China's preparations for the next major step: crewed lunar exploration. The programme has stated goals for a crewed Moon landing before 2030, with a new heavy-lift launch vehicle and a next-generation crewed spacecraft under active development.
In space exploration, as across technological frontiers, engineering constraints meet human ambition — and occasionally, we achieve the impossible. Yang Liwei was the human embodiment of that moment for China in 2003. The programme he helped launch is now building the hardware to put taikonauts on the Moon.
That is a remarkable two decades of work — and by any honest accounting, it is not finished.
