{"id":287442,"date":"2026-02-17T00:16:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T00:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/287442\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T00:16:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T00:16:14","slug":"chinas-first-man-in-space-yang-liwei-officially-retires-from-active-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/287442\/","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":287443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[607,19165,159885,25682,4431,159891,159890,159889,159887,40618,3323,111,139,159886,69,2476,8105,147,159888,159881,159882,159883,159884,392,23179,42353],"class_list":["post-287442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-china","tag-china-manned-space-agency","tag-chinese-space-programme","tag-communist-party","tag-hong-kong","tag-jing-haipeng","tag-liu-boming","tag-liu-wang","tag-long-march-f-rocket","tag-macau","tag-nasa","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nie-haisheng","tag-nz","tag-pakistan","tag-russia","tag-science","tag-shenzhou-5","tag-shenzhou-6","tag-shenzhou-7","tag-shenzhou-8","tag-shenzhou-9","tag-space","tag-state-council","tag-yang-liwei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}