China's first astronaut Yang Liwei was officially awarded the title Space Hero and presented with a badge of honor for his spacefaring merits by the Chinese central authorities at a grand rally held in Beijing Friday morning.

Yang became an instant star on Oct. 15, when he began his 21-hour space mission to go where no Chinese man had gone before.

He had been promoted from the rank of lieutenant colonel to the rank of full colonel by the Astronaut Team of the People's Liberation Army for his outstanding performance during training before the mission.

However, he was notified of the promotion after his successful return from space in a bid to help him remain level-headed before the mission.

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 the Earth the day after orbiting the planet 14 times on a 21-hour mission, was an intelligent student, air force pilot and astronaut.

Born to a family of teachers in 1965 in Suizhong County, northeast China's Liaoning Province, then the country's leading industrial center, Yang had a happy and tranquil childhood.

Unlike 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 his 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 lowflying exercise in the summer of 1992 in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygyur Autonomous Region.

One of the two engines of his fighter jet suddenly stopped working 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 also 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 wet with 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 other space cadets, from among 1,500 pilotsfor space flight training.

Yang passed China's stringent astronaut selection tests in 1996 and 1997, due to his excellent physical condition, including low oxygen resistance capability in aircraft 10,000 meters above the ground.

He began to receive theoretical training on manned space flight in Beijing. The 30-strong course included an "ABC of Manned Space Flight" 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, 1.68m tall, 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 student of 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 spinning in circles at home. He explained that he was practicing for upcoming tests ona special swivel chair.

A senior expert in charge of the training said Yang was the best of his students, his favorite.

Yang chose not to use a 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 to express his love and care for his wife.

He asked his mother to come to Beijing to look after his wife during his absence, and declined an offer from his commander to postpone the training.

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 disc so that he could watch it in his spare time.

During the last professional technical tests, Yang 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 scored 99 outof 100 in two tests and perfect scores in three tests.

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