Good health, intelligence, amazing willpower and eagerness to
succeed, as well as a happy family life, have made Yang Liwei
China's first astronaut.
The 38-year-old, who returned safely to earth early on Thursday
after orbiting the planet 14 rounds on a 21-hour mission, was an
intelligent student, air force pilot and astronaut.
On Thursday, he was flown to the Beijing-based Space City, where
he works and lives as an astronaut, soon after he landed in Inner
Mongolia Autonomous Region, north China. A medical check passed him
as perfectly fit.
Born to a family of teachers in 1965 Suizhong County, north
China's Liaoning Province, then the country's leading industrial
center, Yang had a happy and tranquil childhood.
Unlike that of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in
space, and Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut, Yang's
family background was by no means humble or poor by Chinese
standards. Gagarin was a carpenter's son and Shepard grew up on the
family farm.
At that time, hundreds of millions of his compatriots had little
education, and the number of people under the poverty line totaled
250 million by the late 1970s, mostly farmers. The profession of
teaching also meant a stable income and life-long employment in
China in the 1960s.
He was intelligent as a child and a good team leader of his
playmates, his parents recalled.
With good scores in middle school entrance exams, Yang was
selected by the best middle school in the county.
Yang won many prizes in maths competitions.
In 1983, Yang was recruited by the No. 8 Aviation College of the
Air Force of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and became a
fighter pilot after graduating with a bachelor's degree. He was a
straight A student in every subject during his four year
training.
He became an attack aircraft pilot in the air force, and he was
rated the elite of his air force division.
Yang demonstrated his crisis management capability during a low
flying exercise in the summer of 1992 in north China's Xinjiang
Uygyur Autonomous Region.
One of the two engines of the fighter jet suddenly stopped
working in mid-air following a loud noise.
With great calmness, he reported what had happened to the ground
command center while operating the aircraft carefully in a bid to
fly home.
His aircraft climbed to 500 meters and then 1,500 meters, and
eventually over Mount Tianshan.
But the other engine stopped working when he was close to the
runway.
Without hesitation, Yang moved to put down the undercarriage,
and the plane managed to land without power.
Yang was all wet by sweat when he climbed out of his cockpit
amid cheers from his colleagues.
The division commander greeted him with the decision to record a
third-class merit for Yang.
As a fighter pilot, Yang had 1,350 hours of flight experience.
He was chosen, with 13 others, from among 1,500 pilots for space
flight training.
Yang passed China's stringent astronaut selection tests in 1996
and 1997 with excellent physical condition, including low oxygen
resistance capability in aircraft 10,000 meters above the
ground.
He began to receive theoretical training on manned spaceflight
in Beijing after he was selected for the first group of Chinese
astronauts. The 30-strong course included an "ABC of Manned
Spaceflight" and "Identification of Stars", aviation dynamics, air
dynamics, geophysics, meteorology, astronomy, space navigation,
design principles and the structure of rockets and spacecraft, as
well as equipment examination. Moreover, they received systematic
training in space flight simulators.
"To establish myself as a qualified astronaut, I have studied
harder than in my college years and have received training much
tougher than for a fighter pilot," said Yang.
During the first two years of training, Yang, 168 cm tall and a
lieutenant colonel, said he never went to bed before midnight in
order to be the best.
In a bid to improve his English, he often called his wife from
his apartment in Space City, asking her to help him practice
English.
Yang, who used to be poor in English, passed English-language
tests with full scores.
He performed well in exercises designed to improve weight
resistance capability in simulators moving at speed.
But for Yang, training was not confined to training sites.
He was once found by his wife Zhang Yumei moving in circles at
home. He explained that he was practicing for upcoming tests on a
special swivel chair.
A senior expert in charge of the training said Yang was the best
of his students, his favorite.
Yang chose not use pillow on his bed for several days before a
training session in which the head of a trainee was in a position
lower than the rest of the body.
Su Shuangning, director-general and chief designer of the
astronaut system under China's manned space program, described Yang
as a sober-minded person with a "superb capability for
self-control".
To his wife, Zhang, a middle school teacher, Yang is a caring
husband, and to his eight-year-old son, Yang is a hero.
Zhang said she could not forget the expression in his eyes when
she was about to be carried into an operating room for a kidney
biopsy operation in July 2001. She suffered nephritis.
"Just at the moment when I was to enter the operating theater, I
saw the expressions of extreme care, love and regret like I've
never seen. I felt as if a knife had pierced my heart," recalled
Zhang.
She was very weak after the operation, but Yang had to leave
Beijing three days after the operation for upper air training in
Jilin Province, northeast China.
Yang sat on a chair beside her sickbed throughout the whole
evening before his departure apparently to express his love and
care for his wife.
He asked his mother to come to Beijing to look after his wife
for him during his absence, and declined an offer from his
commander to postpone the training, in which he did quite well.
As China's first manned space launch drew closer, Yang was among
the three finalists chosen for the maiden voyage.
In order to familiarize himself with sophisticated operations,
Yang put all the charts on facilities inside the capsule on the
wall in his dormitory.
He also video-taped the equipment and structure of the capsule,
and recorded the footage on a video compact disk on its own so that
he could watch it in his spare time.
During the last professional technical tests, Yang did
identified and remedied all the "faults" his instructors had set
up.
His instructor would ask him after each test whether he had made
any operational errors, and he always answered confidently, "No
errors at all".
During five tests of normal flight procedures, he got 99 scores
out of 100 in two and full scores in three tests.
In an interview before the manned mission, Yang told Xinhua he
could recite all the flight and operation procedures.
"I can still remember the positions of all meters and switches
inside the capsule even when I close my eyes. I can describe the
color, position and role of any part of the capsule you name.
"I'm capable of coping with an emergency situation without the
flight manual."
His psychological instructor once asked him what he would feel
if he were to fly a real spacecraft.
"I think I would be more relaxed than in training. So let me go
for the flight," Yang answered with a smile.
(Xinhua News Agency October 17, 2003)
