The making of heroes - the women and men of China's space program

BEIJING -- Taikonaut Zhang Xiaoguang prepared for 15 years to go into space.

Zhang, one of the 14 pilots recruited as China's first batch of taikonauts, was 32 when he joined the Taikonaut Corps of People's Liberation Army at its founding in 1998.

In order to pass the more than 30 fundamental courses that are required of every taikonaut, he wrote over 200,000 Chinese characters of study notes.

He studied advanced mathematics, aerodynamics, astronomy, English, environmental science, medicine, psychology, space science and technology and many other theoretical courses, all in one year, a superhuman task equal to compressing a normal college student's four-year study plan into 12 months.

Liu Yang, in the second batch of taikonauts in 2010 and China's first woman in space in 2012, described the taikonaut life as "becoming a student once more."

To pilot the spacecraft, Zhang had to memorize nine spaceflight manuals. He learned from Yang Liwei, China's first man in space. He bought a camera, took photos and videos of every nook and cranny of the capsule simulator, saved them on his computer, and pored over them whenever he had a spare second.

Zhang could soon close his eyes, and tell the name, position and function of every button on the flight deck, without a mistake.

He was described by his crewmate Nie Haisheng as the most persistent man he had ever met.

In 2013, Zhang, Nie Haisheng and Wang Yaping, were selected for the Shenzhou-10 mission, Zhang's first trip to space. To an audience of over 300 schoolchildren in a Beijing auditorium, Wang Yaping delivered China's first lecture from space with Zhang as her cameraman.

On its 15-day journey, Shenzhou-10 docked with orbiting space lab Tiangong-1 twice, taking China ever closer to the objective of a permanent, manned space station by 2020.

On his return to Earth, Zhang said, we were dreamers, and now our dream has come true.