China to announce recruitment plan for women astronauts

By Hou Lei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-08-10 15:16

The Chinese government will announce a plan to choose the country's first female astronaut at the end of this year, the Beijing News reported Monday.

"Preparation of female astronauts' selection is underway but we do not yet have detailed schedule for that," said Chen Shanguang, director of the Scientific Research Training Center for Chinese Astronauts, which is responsible for astronauts' selection and training. "We will publicize the selection plan at the end of this year."

Yang Liwei, China's first spaceman and now the vice chief the training center, said the standards for female astronauts had already been determined, and were based on scientific data from experiments conducted on volunteers.

An earlier report from Xinhua News Agency said potential female astronauts would be recruited from the 16 female fighter pilots who graduated from a pilot training institute of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force this April. They were the first batch of Chinese young women qualified to fly fighter jets.

In 1963, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova from the Soviet Union became first woman to fly in space, only two years after the country's Yuri Gagarin completed world's first manned space flight.

It was not until twenty years later that Sally Kristen Ride became the first female American to enter space in 1983 – twenty two years after Alan Shepard made the country's first manned space flight in 1961.

China selected 14 pilots from its air force in late 1990s to be astronauts. None of them, however, were women. Of the 14, so far six of them have actually travelled into space.

The country began selection of a second batch of astronauts, including female astronauts, after last year's successful Shenzhou VII space flight. Yang said all astronauts will still be from the Air Force, and that the country has no plan to recruit scientists to be astronauts.

Yang also said all of the first batch of astronauts – including Yang himself – are preparing for China's next space mission.