Zhu Yangzhu: Rejected Twice by the Air Force
He applied to become a Chinese Air Force pilot in high school and failed the entrance requirements. He applied again in his fourth year of university and failed again. Fourteen years after that second rejection, Zhu Yangzhu rode a Long March 2F to the Tiangong space station as flight engineer of Shenzhou 16 — one of the first two members of China's third astronaut intake ever to fly. He had reached orbit not by learning to fly but by becoming an expert in how air moves.
Pei County to Changsha
Zhu Yangzhu (朱杨柱) was born in September 1986 in Pei County, part of the city of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province. After the air force turned him down, he took the academic route into the Chinese aerospace establishment, studying at the National University of Defence Technology in Changsha — the People's Liberation Army's premier scientific institution — in the faculty of aerospace engineering, specialising in missile design. He completed postdoctoral research at the same university. His fields are aerodynamics and fluid dynamics.
He then became an associate professor at the PLA Strategic Support Force's Space Engineering University, headquartered in Huairou north of Beijing, and rose to the rank of colonel. By the standards of the first two generations of Chinese astronauts — drawn almost exclusively from fighter pilots — this was an entirely unfamiliar biography.
The Third Batch
That is precisely why it worked. In 2020 China opened its third astronaut selection round specifically to recruit spaceflight engineers and payload specialists rather than pilots, reflecting a station programme that needed people who could maintain and repair hardware and run science rather than merely fly spacecraft. Zhu went through a three-stage selection process, was inducted into the PLA Astronaut Corps in September 2020, and was formally sworn in on 1 October — China's National Day.
Shenzhou 16
The Long March 2F left Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre on 30 May 2023 Beijing time — the evening of 29 May in the United States — and the spacecraft docked at Tiangong's radial port a few hours later. Zhu and his crewmate Gui Haichao became the first members of the 2020 intake to reach orbit.
The crew was itself a statement about how China's programme had changed. Jing Haipeng commanded, on his fourth spaceflight. Gui Haichao, a professor at Beihang University, flew as payload specialist and became China's first civilian astronaut. Zhu flew as spaceflight engineer. All three held doctorates. For a few days the station held six people, as the outgoing Shenzhou 15 crew of Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu prepared to depart in early June.
Zhu's assignment was the unglamorous half of the mission: repairs and maintenance of the station's systems and of its laboratory cabinets. He had trained extensively underwater in preparation for extravehicular work, and performed one spacewalk lasting 7 hours and 55 minutes. The wider mission programme covered experiments in quantum phenomena, relativistic verification and astrobiology, alongside maintenance and educational broadcasts to Chinese schoolchildren. The crew returned on 31 October 2023 after 154 days, 8 hours and 25 minutes in space.
On 24 May 2026 Zhu returned to orbit as commander of Shenzhou 23 — a promotion from first-time flight engineer to mission commander in under three years.
Why Yangzhu Is Called a Genius
No source consulted uses the word about him, and the claim should be built only from what the record supports. What the record supports is a specific and demanding technical competence, and a career that says something structural about how spaceflight has changed.
His discipline is aerodynamics and fluid dynamics — the mathematics of how gases and liquids behave under pressure, heat and motion. It is the field that governs atmospheric re-entry, launch vehicle stability, propellant behaviour, and the thermal and life-support systems that keep a station habitable. A doctorate and postdoctoral work in it, plus an associate professorship, means Zhu arrived on Tiangong understanding the physics of the machine he was living inside at the level of the engineers who built it. That is exactly the qualification the flight engineer role exists to exploit: when a laboratory cabinet or an environmental system misbehaves in orbit, the person on board needs to reason from first principles, not from a checklist, because the checklist was written for the failure that was anticipated.
The other quality worth naming is the discipline itself — the years of underwater EVA rehearsal, the memorised procedures, the tolerance for repetition that spaceflight training demands. Nearly eight hours in a suit outside a space station is not a feat of intellect; it is a feat of preparation.
The honest counter-case is that Zhu's documented achievements are institutional rather than individual. He has published no discovery the public sources single out, commanded no breakthrough, and his mission's headline science belonged to others. He is a highly trained professional in a programme designed to make individual brilliance unnecessary — that is the point of the system. And the twice-rejected-pilot story, appealing as it is, is a story about persistence and an alternative route, not about exceptional cognition. Genius overstates it. Deep expertise, applied under conditions where mistakes are fatal, is the accurate description.
Legacy
Zhu Yangzhu is a marker of a transition. China's first astronauts were fighter pilots; its space station needs engineers and scientists, and in 2020 the selection criteria changed to find them. He and Gui Haichao were the first products of that change to fly, and the fact that all three Shenzhou 16 crew members held doctorates was itself the news. His rapid elevation to command of Shenzhou 23 in 2026 suggests the programme now regards the engineer's route as a full career path rather than a specialist detour. The teenager who could not pass the air force medical ended up commanding a spacecraft — by way of a fluid dynamics laboratory in Changsha.
Achievements
- Educated at National University of Defense Technology
- Worked as astronaut and engineer
