Islamabad (GNP): Two Pakistani pilots are training in Beijing for a mission that will make one of them the country’s first astronaut and the first foreign national to travel aboard China’s Tiangong space station. A final decision on who flies is expected in mid-to-late October, according to Amer Gilani, who oversees human spaceflight cooperation at Pakistan’s space agency, SUPARCO.
Pilots Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud have spent months at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center, preparing for a mission the two countries conceived in 2019. China has not said which of them will fly or when. The training covers Mandarin, spacecraft systems and how to eat, sleep and repair equipment in weightlessness, along with centrifuge exercises that mimic the forces of launch. The selected pilot will go into space directly from training in China and return to Pakistan only after a recovery period.
The pair beat about 20 finalists picked from an initial pool of Pakistani pilots and scientists, all screened for medical fitness, psychological resilience and tolerance of high g-forces. SUPARCO’s director of artificial intelligence (AI), Uzair Ansari, said that last trait is why pilots with high-speed flying backgrounds were chosen. Ansari said, “You cannot easily find scientists who are familiar with travelling and facing high-level g-forces.”
Once in orbit, the chosen pilot will serve as a payload specialist, whose job is to run experiments and not to fly the spacecraft. SUPARCO received more than 300 proposals from universities in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad after a year-long campaign, and Chinese institutes picked four biotechnology experiments focused on food security and climate change. Each one is built and tested in SUPARCO laboratories before Chinese engineers approve it, which Ansari said lets Pakistani technology be validated on an international platform.
The scientific load is small beside the station’s record. Tiangong has hosted more than 180 experiments and produced over 500 research papers and 150 patents. Its three modules, Tianhe, Wentian and Mengtian, weigh about 77 metric tonnes combined and hold around 14 experiment racks covering life sciences, materials, fluid physics, combustion and radiation exposure, with some experiments mounted outside and exposed directly to space.
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China’s role goes beyond the station itself. Pakistan has no independent launch vehicle or crewed spacecraft, so the astronaut will fly in a Chinese-built craft launched from a Chinese site, trained by Chinese instructors and speaking Mandarin in orbit. The stay is expected to last about a week, far shorter than the roughly six-month rotations of career Chinese crew. The astronaut will return with two members of a Chinese crew that arrived in May, while the third stays for a year to support research on long-duration human physiology.
The flight would also be a first for China, which has never before carried a foreign astronaut into space. Citizens of about 50 countries have flown since Yuri Gagarin in 1961, but only Russia, the United States and China have launched their own crewed spacecraft.
The mission sits within wider space cooperation with Beijing that straddles the Belt and Road Initiative. It has already produced Chinese-launched Pakistani satellites and a joint satellite-navigation system. A Pakistani-built rover is also due to fly on China’s Chang’e 8 lunar mission around 2028, using AI-based stereo imaging to detect obstacles and plan its own route, since Earth-based controllers cannot guide it in real time.
Asked whether Pakistan had secured any promise of a future moon flight, Gilani said there was no official commitment or discussion, and that what comes next will depend on the country’s first mission. Ansari called the flight a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for Pakistani scientists.
