Pakistan’s First Astronaut Will Join China’s Tiangong Space Station

China will carry a Pakistani astronaut to the Tiangong space station aboard Shenzhou-24, opening its crewed space program to a foreign participant for the first time and placing Pakistan on course to send its first citizen into orbit.

The China Manned Space Agency announced the assignment on November 7. The astronaut will serve as a payload specialist, spend a short period aboard Tiangong and return to Earth on Shenzhou-23. Beijing has not named the flyer or announced a launch date, a distinction that matters amid speculation about when the mission will leave the ground.

Two Pakistani candidates, Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, have trained at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing. China selected them in April after a three-stage process launched under a bilateral agreement signed in Islamabad in February 2025. One will fly; the other will serve as the backup.

The mission is more than a flag-raising exercise. Pakistani space officials told Reuters that the payload specialist will carry four biotechnology experiments selected from more than 300 proposals submitted by universities in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. The experiments focus on food security and climate change, and Pakistani laboratories are building and testing them before Chinese engineers approve them for flight.

FILE — Rear view of the Tiangong space station, June 2, 2023. China Manned Space Engineering Office, CC BY 4.0. Source.

That gives Pakistan’s scientific institutions access to an orbital laboratory they could not build alone. Pakistan has no independent crewed spacecraft or human-rated launch vehicle. China supplies the rocket, capsule, station, training center and mission control. Pakistan supplies the astronaut and research program. The imbalance is real, but so is the transfer of operational experience to a country long kept on the lower rungs of the global technology system.

Tiangong itself carries political weight. Only China, Russia and the United States have independently launched people into orbit. Washington’s congressional restrictions have sharply limited direct NASA cooperation with Chinese state space institutions since 2011. Those restrictions helped push China’s crewed program onto a separate institutional track. Beijing built its own permanent station and is now deciding which international partners enter it.

Pakistan will be the first. The choice reflects a partnership already extending beyond a single flight. China has launched Pakistani satellites, the two countries cooperate on satellite navigation, and Pakistan is preparing a rover for China’s planned Chang’e-8 lunar mission. The Shenzhou assignment turns that relationship from remote sensing and robotic exploration into human spaceflight.

It also tests whether China can make Tiangong a durable platform for Global South science rather than a national showcase with occasional foreign guests. Flying one astronaut does not erase the vast inequality in space access. Launch capacity, research funding and industrial supply chains remain concentrated in a handful of states and corporations. A serious international program would give participating countries sustained experiment time, training and control over the knowledge produced.

The Pakistani mission points in that direction. It follows a broader pattern in Beijing’s development partnerships, including recent China-Gabon agreements centered on local processing rather than raw-material extraction. The terms and results deserve scrutiny, but the contrast with barriers that keep advanced infrastructure concentrated among wealthy states is difficult to miss.

China is also preparing for a crewed lunar landing before 2030. Its next decisions will show whether international participation stops at low Earth orbit or grows into deeper-space cooperation. Pakistani officials say no lunar astronaut commitment exists. For now, the achievement is concrete enough: one of two Pakistani pilots is training to carry national experiments into orbit on a Chinese spacecraft.

When Shenzhou-24 launches, it will carry more than two flags. It will demonstrate that a space station built outside the U.S.-led system can become a working international institution. Pakistan’s first flight will not settle who controls the future of space, but it will widen the number of countries with a direct stake in that contest.

Hero photograph: FILE — Shenzhou-23’s Long March 2F rocket during rollout at Jiuquan, May 16, 2026. China News Service, CC BY 4.0; cropped for the V9 card.