{"id":301827,"date":"2026-02-17T03:01:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T03:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/301827\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T03:01:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T03:01:13","slug":"chinas-first-man-in-space-yang-liwei-officially-retires-from-active-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/301827\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s first man in space Yang Liwei officially retires from active duty"},"content":{"rendered":"

China\u2019s first man in space<\/a>, Yang Liwei, has officially retired from active duty, but he has not stopped training and remains ready to put on a spacesuit again if needed.<\/p>\n

He said in a CCTV interview on Saturday that the country\u2019s first group of astronauts had been grounded in October according to regulations, but \u201cif our motherland needs us, we can resume flights\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yang, now a deputy chief designer for China\u2019s crewed space programme<\/a>, was the first Chinese national to reach Earth\u2019s orbit in 2003.<\/p>\n

On October 15 of that year, he blasted off aboard the Shenzhou-5 spacecraft on a Long March-2F rocket, just 16 hours after being told that he had been selected for the mission from a shortlist of three astronauts, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).<\/p>\n

During the Shenzhou-5 mission, Yang spent 21 hours in space, orbiting the Earth 14 times.<\/p>\n

It was a turning point for the nation\u2019s human space flight programme, which began in 1992, and made China the third country to independently send humans into space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China\u2019s first man in space, Yang Liwei, has officially retired from active duty, but he has not stopped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[114,14914,142743,20867,240,61,60,142749,142748,142747,142745,35904,91,142744,3324,3589,82,142746,142739,142740,142741,142742,247,5767,35616],"class_list":{"0":"post-301827","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-china","9":"tag-china-manned-space-agency","10":"tag-chinese-space-programme","11":"tag-communist-party","12":"tag-hong-kong","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-jing-haipeng","16":"tag-liu-boming","17":"tag-liu-wang","18":"tag-long-march-f-rocket","19":"tag-macau","20":"tag-nasa","21":"tag-nie-haisheng","22":"tag-pakistan","23":"tag-russia","24":"tag-science","25":"tag-shenzhou-5","26":"tag-shenzhou-6","27":"tag-shenzhou-7","28":"tag-shenzhou-8","29":"tag-shenzhou-9","30":"tag-space","31":"tag-state-council","32":"tag-yang-liwei"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}