21 Hours That Made China a Space Power
On October 15, 2003, Yang Liwei rode Shenzhou 5 into orbit, making China the third nation to launch a human into space.
At 9:00 on the morning of October 15, 2003, a pillar of fire rose over the Gobi Desert. From the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, a Long March 2F rocket lifted off carrying the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft — and inside it, a single passenger: 38-year-old Yang Liwei, a lieutenant colonel in the People's Liberation Army and former fighter pilot. China was about to put a human being in space.
The flight had been decades in the making. A crewed space program — known as Project 921 — had been approved back in 1992. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, four uncrewed Shenzhou test flights proved the spacecraft could reach orbit and return safely. Now, with President Hu Jintao watching from the launch center, it was time for the real thing.
Minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft separated from its rocket and settled into orbit. For the next 21 hours, Yang Liwei circled the Earth fourteen times, conducting the first crewed mission in his nation's history. State television did not broadcast the launch live — the pictures were aired nearly half an hour later, once success was certain — but when they aired, the country watched its first astronaut float above the planet.
Late that night, the return capsule parachuted down onto the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and Yang climbed out smiling. The mission had lasted 21 hours and 23 minutes. It had made China only the third country in history — after the Soviet Union and the United States — capable of launching a human into space and bringing him home again.
The achievement was about more than prestige, though prestige mattered enormously. An independent human spaceflight capability meant China no longer depended on any other nation to reach orbit. In the years that followed, Shenzhou 5's success became the foundation of everything China has done in space since: the spacewalks, the docking missions, the Tiangong space station, the robotic missions to the Moon and Mars.
Yang Liwei became a national hero overnight — the man schoolchildren learned about alongside ancient inventors. His portrait appeared on postage stamps, and his name entered the textbooks. But his flight's deeper meaning belonged to his country: on October 15, 2003, in 21 hours and 23 minutes, China crossed the threshold from spacefaring nation to space power. It has never looked back.
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