Yang Liwei
The China Manned Space Engineering Office opened a consultation for the naming of the prospective cargo ship on April 25, 2011. By May 20, it had received more than 50,000 suggestions. On July 8 Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut and deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed that they had a short list of ten names. On October 31, 2013, it was revealed that the spacecraft had been named Tianzhou (), combining the Chinese names of the Tiangong () space stations and the Shenzhou () spacecraft. They also stated that they would use the two letter identification TZ.