China’s first man in space, Yang Liwei, has officially retired from active duty, but he has not stopped training and remains ready to don a spacesuit again if needed.
He said in a CCTV interview on Saturday that the country’s first group of astronauts had been grounded in October according to regulations, but “if our motherland needs us, we can resume flights”.
Yang, now a deputy chief designer for China’s crewed space programme, was the first Chinese national to reach Earth’s orbit in 2003.
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