China's First Astronauts Have All Stood Down From Flight, Yang Liwei Says

The generation that carried China's crewed space programme from nothing has formally stood down. Yang Liwei, who became the first Chinese citizen in orbit in 2003, told a State Council Information Office press conference on September 21 that he and all of his first-batch colleagues had stopped flying and training as of October 2025, and now work on the selection and training of those who follow.

The timing was deliberate. The press conference fell on the 34th anniversary of the programme's founding — the State Council approved the crewed flight project on September 21, 1992, when China had no spacecraft, no spacesuit and no experience to copy. Fourteen fighter pilots were chosen in 1998 to form the first astronaut corps, and nine of them eventually flew. The remaining five trained for decades and served as backups flight after flight, but never got their own mission — a detail that has drawn the most reaction on Chinese social media, where one widely shared post put it simply: "an era has come to a close."

Yang, who flew aboard Shenzhou 5 in October 2003 and remains the most recognisable face of the programme, said the ground-down first batch has moved into technical work — running the selection and training pipeline that produced their successors. Those successors, he noted, are already stacked three deep: the second batch of astronauts has become the backbone of current missions, the third is maturing, and the fourth is "beginning to show itself."

The announcement trended near the top of Baidu's board within a day, and its traction reflects how the first batch is remembered: not merely as astronauts but as the proof of concept for the whole enterprise. The fourteen men trained on equipment that often had to be invented around them, without foreign blueprints to copy, and nine of them flew at a time when a crewed Chinese launch was a national event watched on office televisions.

What comes next for the class of 1998 is ground work and, eventually, the telling of it. The batch that replaced them has already flown China's space station missions; the one after that is in rotation; and the fourth — recruited with payload specialists from Hong Kong and Macao — is waiting its turn. For the five first-batch astronauts whose names never made it to a launch, the stand-down closes a career that the country's space programme spent three decades preparing and never used. The public response to their story suggests that, for Chinese readers, the most affecting part of the announcement was not the end of an era but the ones who carried it without ever leaving the ground.