Two Pakistani pilots are memorising Mandarin, spinning in centrifuge drills, and learning to eat, sleep, and repair equipment while weightless as a decision nears on which one will become the first foreign astronaut aboard China’s Tiangong space station. The voyage into space would be a first for Pakistan, and it forms part of a broader cooperation with Beijing that straddles the Belt and Road Initiative and has already produced Chinese-launched Pakistani satellites, a joint satellite navigation system, and a Pakistani-built rover due to fly on China’s Chang’e 8 lunar mission around 2028. Pilots Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud have spent months training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Centre in Beijing for a mission first conceived by the two countries in 2019, according to Amer Gilani, who oversees human spaceflight cooperation at Pakistan’s space agency, SUPARCO. China has not said which of the two will fly or when, but Gilani said a final astronaut selection decision is expected in mid-to-late October.
Whoever is chosen will not return to Pakistan before launch, setting off into space directly from training in China and returning home only after a recovery period following the return to Earth, Gilani told Reuters. Training includes intensive Chinese-language instruction, learning spacecraft systems, and adapting to both the microgravity of orbit and the g-forces of liftoff. The two men beat out roughly 20 finalists culled from an initial Pakistani pool of pilots and scientists, screened for medical fitness, psychological resilience, and, according to SUPARCO’s director of artificial intelligence Uzair Ansari, a tolerance for g-forces that few scientists possess. “You cannot easily find scientists who are familiar with travelling and facing high-level g-forces,” he said, explaining why the two men with backgrounds in high-speed flying were chosen. The details shared by Gilani and Ansari are the first insight provided by SUPARCO to foreign media since the pilots were selected and deployed to China; China’s space agency did not respond to a request for comment about the selection process.
Once in space, the chosen pilot will carry the title of “payload specialist,” astronaut-speak for someone whose job in orbit is running Pakistan’s science experiments rather than flying the ship, Ansari said. Of more than 300 proposals SUPARCO fielded from universities in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad after a year-long campaign, Gilani said Chinese institutes picked four for this flight, covering biotechnology experiments aimed at combating food insecurity and climate change. Every experiment is built and pre-tested in SUPARCO’s own labs before Chinese engineers sign off, which Ansari called a rare case of Pakistani technology being validated on an international platform. The scientific payload is modest next to a station that has already hosted more than 180 experiments and produced over 500 research papers and 150 patents. Tiangong’s three modules, Tianhe, Wentian, and Mengtian, weigh about 77 metric tons combined and house roughly 14 experiment racks spanning life sciences, materials, fluid physics, combustion, and radiation exposure, Gilani said, some of them mounted outside the station and exposed directly to space.
The astronaut will fly aboard a Chinese-built spacecraft, launched from a Chinese site, trained by Chinese instructors, and communicate in Mandarin in orbit. Pakistan has no independent launch vehicle or crewed spacecraft of its own, and the stay itself will last about a week, a fraction of the roughly six-month rotations career Chinese crew members typically serve. The Pakistani astronaut is due to return with two members of a Chinese crew that arrived at the space station in May, since the third member is expected to stay for a year to study long-duration human physiology in space. Since Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 first flight, citizens of about 50 countries have flown in space, but only three nations, Russia, the US, and China, have launched their own crewed spacecraft, making China’s invitation to Pakistan the first time it will transport a foreign astronaut. Asked whether Islamabad had secured any promise to send an astronaut to the moon under the same partnership, Gilani said there is no official commitment or discussion on the matter, adding that what comes next will depend on how “our maiden mission” turns out. The Pakistani-built lunar rover set to fly on China’s Chang’e 8 mission is a separate strand of that cooperation, and Ansari said it will use AI-based stereo imaging to detect obstacles, judge depth, and plan its own path across the lunar surface, since Earth-based controllers cannot guide it in real time. Still, Ansari was clear that the mission is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for Pakistani scientists.
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