Shenzhou 18 has three astronauts to participate, namely: Ye Guangfu, Li Cong, and Li Guangsu.
Among them, Ye Guangfu has the rank of colonel in the army, and the other two have the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. And all three astronauts are from the Air Force.
So, some people here will ask, why is Ye Guangfu with the rank of army colonel, while the other two are lieutenant colonels in the Air Force?
In fact, this question is very simple, astronauts generally come from the Air Force, which is very easy to understand, after all, the Air Force often "deals" with the sky, so it is naturally more suitable for selecting astronauts. But once selected from the Air Force as astronauts, many astronauts have become Army ranks. For example, Yang Liwei, who we are familiar with, is also a major general of the army.
This is because the Chinese astronaut brigade was first subordinate to the General Armament Department of the People's Liberation Army, and the personnel of the General Armament Department of the People's Liberation Army were all military uniforms of the army, so the earliest astronauts all wore army uniforms and wore military ranks of the army. But astronauts do not belong to the army, they just wear army uniforms.
With the progress of military reform, the General Armament Department was abolished and replaced by the Equipment Development Department, but many units of the original General Armament Department were set aside again and a special unit was established, that is, the strategic support force.
As a result, the astronaut brigade was also assigned to the Department of Space Systems in the Strategic Support Force, which was positioned as the fifth largest branch of the military when it was established and was directly under the Military Commission. Taking the 2019 military parade as an example, the two major generals of the strategic support force phalanx wore the uniforms of the army and the air force respectively, and the team members wore the uniforms of the army, navy, air force and other services, so the uniforms of the strategic support forces were not fixed. In this way, the military uniform of the astronaut brigade is not fixed, which branch of the original military is, or the original military uniform, and the military rank is still the original military rank.
This has led to the emergence that those who entered the astronaut brigade before the military reform will wear army uniforms, while those who enter the astronaut brigade after the military reform are all in the original military uniforms.
Therefore, some of the senior astronauts we see are army uniforms, such as Yang Liwei, Wang Yaping, and Liu Yang, all of whom are army uniforms. The third batch of astronauts later is almost all in the Air Force uniforms, and the military ranks are also from the Air Force, all because the selection time of the third batch of astronauts is about 2020, when the military reform has been completed, and the astronaut brigade has long belonged to the strategic support force, so they are all the original Air Force ranks.
Shenzhou 18 astronauts, except for Ye Guangfu is an army colonel, he is the second batch of astronauts, so he is still wearing army uniforms, so he is a colonel, and the other Li Guangsu and Li Cong are the third batch of astronauts, so the two of them are lieutenant colonels in the Air Force.
Now the astronauts on the mainland are not necessarily all active soldiers, and some astronauts do not have military ranks, such as Gui Haichao, who is a professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Astronautics of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, but he still entered the space station on Shenzhou 16 and completed all the tasks.
Therefore, in the future, there may be more scientific researchers entering the space station to complete some scientific experiments.