Pakistan is set to send its first citizen into space. China has confirmed that a Pakistani astronaut will join the Shenzhou-24 crewed mission as a payload specialist, becoming the first foreign national ever to visit the country's Tiangong space station.
The China Manned Space Agency announced the assignment on Saturday, November 7, according to state news agency Xinhua and broadcaster CCTV. The astronaut will make a short stay aboard Tiangong before returning to Earth aboard the Shenzhou-23 spacecraft, which docked with the station in May.
The flight will be the first joint mission involving Chinese and foreign astronauts in the history of China's crewed space programme — and a milestone for Pakistan, which has never before flown one of its own citizens into orbit.
Two pilots trained, one seat to fly
China has not said which of its two Pakistani trainees will make the flight, or when it will launch. The candidates are pilots Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, who were selected in April 2026 after a three-stage selection process and have been training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing.
One of the two will receive the flight assignment; the other will serve as backup. The agency said only that the mission is expected to take place by the end of the year. Pakistan's planning minister, Ahsan Iqbal, said at a ceremony in October that the flight would take place on November 25, though Beijing has not confirmed a date.
A deal signed in February 2025
The seat comes from a cooperation agreement signed in Islamabad in February 2025 between Pakistan's space agency, SUPARCO, and the China Manned Space Agency, covering astronaut selection, training and participation in Chinese space station missions. Under the agreement, two Pakistanis would train in China and one would fly to Tiangong as a payload specialist — a role focused on carrying out scientific experiments in orbit.
The mission is the latest step in a space partnership that has grown steadily in recent years. Pakistan's first lunar satellite, ICUBE-Q, flew aboard China's Chang'e-6 mission in 2024, and the two countries have cooperated on remote-sensing satellites for more than a decade.
What happens next
All eyes are now on the launch date. Shenzhou-24 will carry the Pakistani payload specialist to Tiangong for a short orbital stay, after which the visitor will come home aboard Shenzhou-23. For Pakistan, the flight would put a national flag — and a Pakistani scientist — aboard a space station for the first time, a symbolic moment more than half a century after the country founded its space programme.
By Hamza Faisal
