21 January 2018
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.
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