In February, Pakistan’s Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), the South Asian state’s chief space authority, announced it had shortlisted two astronaut candidates for a trip to Tiangong later this year.

The two unnamed spacefaring hopefuls are currently undergoing training in China, with one of them set to make history as not only Pakistan’s first professional astronaut (a Pakistan-born woman called Namira Salim had previously flown to the edge of space with Virgin Galactic), but also as the first foreign visitor to Tiangong.

For Pakistan, the flight will be a first in an expanded vision for human spaceflight. And a restart. The country, which once made pioneering progress in rocketry, wants to become a major space power within the next 15 years.

By 2040, Pakistan wants to have a thriving satellite sector, possibly even sending rovers to the Moon and Mars, Zubair Mongol, President of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) Pakistan advocacy group, told Supercluster.

“Pakistan will become a space power in the next decade,” said Mongol. “Not just as a passenger, but as an engineer. That’s all happening in our labs right now.”

Mongol, an aerospace engineering graduate from the Institute of Space Technology in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, and his colleagues, only launched SEDS Pakistan last year. They hope to build a foundation for that future burgeoning Pakistani space sector by inspiring students to enter the field and creating a skilled workforce.

SEDS is a global initiative spawned in the 1980s by space exploration proponents Peter Diamandis, Bob Richards, and Todd Hawley with the aim of providing a link between engineering students and the space industry. The non-profit organization has branches all over the world and a headquarters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

For Pakistan, Mongol said, SEDS will serve as a pipeline, inspiring and attracting talent the country needs not only to deliver on the government’s bold space plans, but to grow a commercial space sector, which at the moment doesn’t exist in the country.

“We realized that for Pakistan to become a significant player in space, it wasn’t going to be an endeavor limited to government initiatives alone,” said Mongol. “Our mission is to move students from textbooks to flying hardware, so that we can reduce the national dependency on foreign expertise.”

Since 1990, Pakistan has launched around ten telecommunications, Earth-observing, and experimental satellites. A handful of those, including the Badr-1 communications satellite, put into orbit in 1990, and the Badr-B research satellite launched in 2001, were co-developed by SUPARCO. Since 1990, Pakistan has also purchased a range of geostationary satellites for broadcasting, communications, and internet delivery from a range of providers, including the American aerospace giant Boeing and China Academy of Space Technology.

While most of Pakistan’s recent space activities have been conducted in cooperation with China, the earliest steps in the Pakistani space endeavour had been taken in close cooperation with NASA in the early 1960s. In 1962, the Islamic Republic became the tenth nation to successfully launch a rocket — the Rehbar1 — to space.

Pakistan’s arch-rival India only made it to orbit a year later.

The two-stage solid fuel Rehbar1, assembled in Pakistan by local engineers, was essentially a repurposed NASA’s Nike-Cajun sounding rocket. It reached an altitude of 130 kilometers, well above the Karman line, which is widely considered the boundary of outer space.

Scientists on Earth took photographs of the orange-colored trails created by the sodium vapor dispersing against the darkening dusk sky in the thin upper-atmospheric air. The intricate pattern captured in the photographs marked the first set of data intended to help NASA gain insights into high-altitude air flows above the Indian Ocean, which the agency needed as it prepared for its moon-bound launches.

The lift-off from the Flight Test Range at Sonmiani beach in Baluchistan, on the coast of the Arabian Sea, was overseen solely by Pakistani engineers, according to contemporary media reports, and was the first of more than 200 scientific rocket launches carried out by Pakistan throughout the 1960s. The country later switched to French and British-made rockets, but still, after the cessation of the Apollo program, the Pakistani space program ground to a screeching halt as American funding dried out.

Talking to the Scientia Magazine in 2021, Tariq Mustafa, the now-retired team leader of the Rehbar-One launch project, said that unlike India, Pakistan didn’t have the resources to build an ambitious space program in its own right.

“We luckily got the support of NASA and jumped on that opportunity,” Mustafa told Scientia. “Otherwise, I doubt whether Pakistan independently would have had much of a space program.”

India went on to launch its first citizen into space in 1984 with the USSR and later established a successful homegrown launcher program.

Pakistan’s space program, in the meantime, had slipped into the background as the country reallocated resources towards defense in light of constant political tensions in the region. The Somniani test range, which once saw the spectacular swirls of orange vapors reveal the direction of high-altitude winds, turned into Pakistan’s number one missile testing location. But things might change in the future, and Somniani might once again see rockets fly all the way to space.

The astronaut mission with China, originally announced in 2017, is one step in Pakistan’s ambitious vision that should put the 250-million nation back on the map of who's who in space. The plan includes landing a spacecraft on the Moon by 2035, building a lunar rover to launch with China in 2028, and developing domestic space launch capability by 2040.

Mongol and his colleagues hope that with the right push, the grassroots movement can provide just the right talent to accomplish those goals. “Our focus is human infrastructure,” he said. “Whether that astronaut is on a Chinese mission or a domestic one, they need a ground team of engineers. So we are building that team to ensure that the mission isn't a one-off event, but the start of a sustainable industry.”

First steps have already been taken. In May 2024, Pakistan joined what is still a rather exclusive club of countries that have flown satellites in the Moon’s orbit. The ICUBE Q cubesat was built by students at the Institute of Space Technology, Mongol said, and successfully transmitted images of the Moon’s surface.

The 7-kilogram satellite hitched a ride to space on board China’s Chang’e-6 mission, which famously landed on and retrieved a sample from the Moon’s far side.

ICUBE Q, expected to survive in the harsh environment near Earth’s natural companion for only about six months, made Pakistan the tenth country in history to have successfully flown a satellite in the Moon’s orbit.

Mongol admits that to accomplish the feat, Pakistan needed quite a bit of help from its friends in China.

“We still rely on foreign propulsion systems in our satellites,” Mongol said. “Only when you have your own propulsion systems can you actually call yourself a space power. Now, even though we can build satellites in Pakistan, we rely on propulsion systems from China.”

SEDS, he hopes, will help to change that in the not-so-distant future.

In 2013, a tiny, 1U, cubesat built at the Institute of Space Technology, travelled to low Earth orbit aboard Russia’s Dnepr rocket to test basic communication and imaging technology.

In the meantime, the government-funded SUPARCO celebrated a range of successes with a homegrown line of Earth-observation satellites including the Pakistan Technology Evaluation Satellite (PakTES-1A) and the Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite-1 (PRSS-1), both launched in 2018, and the Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite Earth Observation 1 (PRSC-EO1) and the HS-1 hyperspectral imaging satellite, both lofted to orbit on Chinese rockets in 2025. Further satellite launches are expected in the coming years.

The flurry of activity is already doing its job, drawing young people towards space-related degrees, said Mongol.

“The trend we are seeing at the student level is that students are more and more getting interested,” he said. “From aeronautics towards astronautics, we can see the trend at the grassroot level changing.”

Shehr Bano, Mongol’s SEDS Pakistan co-founder and computer sciences student at the Namal University in Punjab, said that to satisfy Pakistan's nascent space industry’s need for talent, universities need to do a better job inspiring young people with hands-on space projects.

“The problem that we identified is that universities are often too late to inspire rocket scientists,” she said. “Our goal is to engage 1,000 plus high school students in STEM by year one and create a grassroots movement that ensures our engineering labs are full of the best talent in the next decade.”

Right now, Mongol said, students are building mock-up Mars rovers to master the technology to help move the teaching from textbooks to hands-on experience.

In the future, he envisions Pakistan developing its own orbital data centers and satellite constellations to assert its place among the global space elite.

“In the next 5 to 10 years, this is going to be a very important aspect of a nation's power,” said Mongol. “Because if you have the control or if you understand how to utilize space for the betterment of humanity, you will be one of the prosperous countries.”

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You can track China's Tiangong Space Station using Supercluster's Stations Dashboard here on our website or by downloading the Supercluster App for iOS and Android. Visit our interactive Astronaut Database to browse the rich history and exciting future of human spaceflight. We'll be adding Pakistan's astronaut soon.