As a child Liu Yang’s earliest ambition was to be a bus conductor, so she could get to travel on the bus every day. Now she finds herself travelling at several times the speed of sound aboard a Long March rocket.
Liu Yang, a pilot in the People’s Liberation Army, has made history by becoming the first Chinese woman to go into space.
The 33-year-old is among the three-member crew of the Shenzhou 9 mission, the latest step in China’s increasingly ambitious space program.
The Shenzhou 9 mission, which blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the remote north-west of China on Saturday, is a crucial test for China’s rapidly-evolving space program. The 10-day mission will see the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft perform the first manned docking with the Tiangong-1 space lab, a vital step towards China’s ambition to have a working space station by 2020.
But it was the presence of Major Liu among the three-member crew that dominated the build-up to the launch, the fourth manned mission China has sent into space since its first in 2003. Formally introduced to the Chinese people at a televised press conference on Friday, Major Liu has become China’s newest national heroine. She is the top subject of discussion on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
