Either Wang Yaping or Liu Yang – both advanced fighter pilots – is set to be admired as a heavenly heroine by a billion Chinese when one of them becomes the country’s first female “taikonaut”.
Wang or Liu is expected to earn a seat in the Shenzhou IX spacecraft, to be placed in orbit by a Long March rocket fired from the Jiuquan space base in the Gobi desert. The launch will happen “around mid-June”, says the state media. The two women, both in their 30s, appear alongside four men on the shortlist for candidates on the mission to the Tiangong-1 (“Heavenly Palace”) space station.
The launch is being clouded in secrecy by Chinese authorities, but sources quoted in the official press say the crew will be made up of two men and a woman, with Liu considered the favourite.
She has “asked her parents not to speak to the media about her mission”, the China Daily quoted her uncle as saying.
It will make China the third country after the Soviet Union and United States to send a woman into space using its own technology, and represent another propaganda coup for the one-party communist state.
Whoever is chosen will be lauded by her compatriots, but a week or two ago, few Chinese had heard of either woman.
According to their relatives, they were both brilliant students and have impeccable service records.
“They are selected as members of the first batch of female astronauts in China because of their excellent flight skills and psychological quality,” said the official Xinhua news agency.
Photographs posted online show both women in spotless uniforms with ties in communist red, their hair parted and carefully tied behind their heads, and serious expressions. Little is known about their personal lives, but the China Daily said female astronauts must be married and that mothers are preferred, due to fears that the potential exposure to radiation could harm their fertility.
In May 2008, Wang took part in humanitarian relief efforts after an earthquake killed tens of thousands of people in the south western province of Sichuan.
Liu, meanwhile, has been praised for her cool handling of an incident when her jet hit a flock of pigeons but she was still able to land the heavily damaged aircraft. The two women later joined China’s training programme for “taikonauts”, as the country dubs its space travellers.
Women in space
June 16, 1963: Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space, spending more time there than all of the astronauts of Nasa’s Mercury programme combined. She circled the Earth 48 times during 71 hours aboard Vostok 6.
August 19, 1982: Russian cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the second woman in space, serving on a Soyuz mission to dock with the Salyut 7 space station. However, she is perhaps best known for her second Soyuz mission, in 1984, becoming the first woman to perform a spacewalk.
June 18, 1983: Astrophysicist Sally K. Ride becomes America’s first woman astronaut, serving as a mission specialist on the shuttle’s seventh mission.
July 17, 1984: On her final spaceflight, Svetlana Savitskaya jogs almost four spacewalking hours outside the Salyut 7 space station.
October 5, 1984: Kathryn D. Sullivan becomes the first American woman to perform a spacewalk. Sally Ride also flew on this mission, making it the first American spaceflight to include two women as crew members.
September 12, 1992: Mae C. Jemison, an engineer and medical doctor, becomes the first black woman in space. She served as co-investigator on a bone-cell research experiment.
February 3-11, 1995: Eileen M. Collins becomes the first woman to pilot an American space shuttle. Four years later, on July 22, 1999, she becomes the first woman commander of a US shuttle mission.
June 5, December 7, 2002: Biochemist Peggy Whitson becomes the first resident scientist of the International Space Station. During the six-month mission she installs the station’s Mobile Base System, a type of rail car for the station’s robotic arm, performs a 4.5-hour spacewalk and conducts 21 experiments.
July 26, 2005: Eileen M. Collins, the first woman to pilot and to command a Nasa space shuttle, commands Discovery for Nasa’s first mission since the Columbia accident in 2003.