Two Pakistani pilots compete for a historic Shenzhou-24 flight, opening a new chapter in space exploration and scientific cooperation.
ISLAMABAD, Nov. 12 (Focus Pakistan) - A Pakistani astronaut will fly to China’s Tiangong space station, Chinese officials said this week. If the mission goes ahead as planned, he will become the first foreigner to enter Tiangong and the first Pakistani to travel into Earth orbit.
Two men remain in the running: Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud. Both have trained in Beijing since April. Only one gets the seat.
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) set out the plan on November 7. The Pakistani will join the Shenzhou-24 crew as a payload specialist, spend a short spell on the station and ride home in Shenzhou-23, the capsule that lifted three Chinese astronauts to Tiangong in May. China has never flown a foreign astronaut with its own crews before.
The Chinese Embassy in Islamabad shared the news on Wednesday and put out photos of both candidates. It did not say which one will fly. Beijing keeps the other in reserve as backup.
The embassy described the mission as the next step in a friendship that Pakistanis and Chinese have passed down through generations. It said the flight would give young Pakistanis something new to aim for and widen joint work between scientists of the two countries in research and space technology.
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In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun took up the subject at his Monday briefing. He called the two countries “all-weather strategic cooperative partners” and said China wants to work with Islamabad to deepen ties in space and other fields. He also restated China’s support for the peaceful use of outer space.
The paperwork dates back to February 2025. That month, in Islamabad, SUPARCO and the China Manned Space Engineering Office signed an agreement setting out how China would select and train Pakistani candidates and put one on a station mission. Three rounds of assessment followed. Ali and Daud survived all three and reported to the China Astronaut Research and Training Centre in April.
Their programme covered intensive Mandarin, spacecraft systems and preparation for both the microgravity of orbit and the g-forces of launch, according to Amer Gilani, who oversees human spaceflight at SUPARCO.
The Pakistani will work on board, too. CMSA spokesperson Lin Xiqiang has said he will run experiments for Pakistan and share regular duties with the Chinese crew. Gilani said in September that Chinese institutes picked four biotechnology experiments for the flight, aimed at food security and climate change. Pakistani universities in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad submitted more than 300 proposals.
China finished building Tiangong in late 2022. The three-module station circles Earth at roughly 340 to 450 kilometres. Every person who has lived aboard since Shenzhou-12 docked in June 2021 has been Chinese.
Pakistan has already sent hardware further than that. In May 2024, China’s Chang’e-6 mission took ICUBE-Q, a small satellite from Islamabad’s Institute of Space Technology, into orbit around the Moon. The institute built it with Chinese partners. SUPARCO itself goes back to 1961; a year later it fired Rehbar-I, Pakistan’s first sounding rocket, from the coast at Sonmiani.
The embassy also noted the calendar. Pakistan and China mark 75 years of diplomatic relations this year.
No Chinese astronaut has ever boarded the International Space Station. A US law passed in 2011 bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with China. NASA plans to retire the ISS around 2030. China intends to keep Tiangong flying and has opened it to foreign partners.
CMSA has not confirmed a launch date for Shenzhou-24, although Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal pointed to November 25 at a World Space Week event in Narowal last month. Beijing has also not named the astronaut who will fly or said how long he will stay aboard Tiangong.
