Pakistan is quietly picking up the pace in its spacefaring ambitions. On April 22, two Pakistani men – Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, both pilots with the Pakistan Air Force – were selected to undergo training in Beijing in a milestone in their country’s scientific history. Both aspiring astronauts are in deep training at China’s Astronaut Center; one of them will be the first Pakistani astronaut in space on an official mission, and the first foreign national to board China’s Tiangong Space Station. The Tiangong is China’s answer to the International Space Station after the United States blocked China from becoming a part of the ISS.
The Pakistani astronaut will not be a symbolic stowaway, but rather an integral part of the team on the Tiangong as a working scientist expected to work on microgravity experiments, use specialized equipment, and respond to emergencies in orbit. Departure for the mission is scheduled to take place in late 2026.
Back home, Pakistan is facing skyrocketing inflation, soaring energy prices and bills, insurgencies in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and border clashes with India and Afghanistan. Back in 2023, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index downgraded Pakistan to the status of an authoritarian regime due to the encroaching powers of the Pakistan Army in politics.
Among all this turmoil, Pakistan is reaching for the stars. In addition to the upcoming mission that will send a Pakistani to China’s space station, Pakistan’s space agency – the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) – has been quietly launching satellites at an unprecedented pace: five indigenous satellites in the last 16 months.
Pakistan is rarely associated with technological ambition. SUPARCO has remained largely underfunded and stagnant for more than two decades, constantly being overshadowed by its neighbors, especially the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). That makes recent developments all the more surprising.
The first satellite launch was in January 2025 when SUPARCO launched PRSC-EO1, Pakistan’s first indigenously built electro-optical Earth observation satellite. In February 2026, a second electro-optical satellite, EO-2, was launched. Both took off from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.
Then in April 2026, SUPARCO launched the EO-3, the most advanced of the three, from the Taijuan Satellite Launch Center. The EO-3 carries an AI-powered onboard computer that can process imagery in real time instead of the older model of beaming raw data to a ground station. The EO-3 satellite also has a Multi-Geometry Imaging Module for enhanced accuracy and an advanced energy storage system, both of which were made in-house by SUPARCO.
In between these three observation satellites, Pakistan also launched its first hyperspectral satellite, called the HS-1, in October 2025. The HS-1 is capable of analyzing hundreds of light bands to detect mineral deposits, crop growth, and environmental shifts caused by climate change with precision.
In July 2025, the KS-1 was launched from the Xichang Satellite Center. The KS-1 is a high-resolution remote sensing satellite capable of round-the-clock imaging. With these five launches, Pakistan now has seven satellites in orbit, which seemed far-fetched just a decade ago.
Importantly, none of Pakistan’s recent space achievements would be possible without Chinese help. The Pakistani astronaut candidates are being trained by China for a mission to a Chinese space station. Every recent satellite launch has been from a Chinese facility. The most ambitious and technologically challenging space mission for SUPARCO – the lunar rover program, which is planned for landing in 2028 – will rely on Chinese technological and technical assistance.
This is not a purely transactional launch service and technical contracting; rather the level of cooperation showcases the depth of the China-Pakistan relationship. Pakistan will become the first foreign country to send an astronaut to China’s Tiangong station, which is a geopolitical milestone. This has gotten less attention on the global stage than it deserves. This has strategic value for Beijing as well, as Pakistan is a Muslim majority country with ties to both the West and the Gulf. Pakistan’s participating could help China position the Tiangong as a better alternative to the U.S.-led ISS.
However, recent developments also display the structural embedding of Pakistan’s space ambitions into China’s own program. Critics call out SUPARCO’s collaboration with China as dependency as Pakistan leans heavily on tried and tested Chinese designs rather than conducting their own research. Pakistan needs to change its trajectory, otherwise it will never advance to deeper technological achievements.
SUPARCO was a trailblazer in the first decade after its founding in 1961. Then it was hit by continuous decades of underfunding, political neglect, nepotism, military coups, brain drain, and corruption. Pakistan’s space program still faces the same financial, industrial, and academic constraints such as that have haunted it since the Cold War. Pakistan’s universities do not have the technical expertise to churn out advanced space technology education while public investment priorities are perpetually distorted by debt servicing and military expenditure.
SUPARCO’s developmental budget for 2025-2026 was 5.4 billion rupees ($19.2 million), which was subsequently revised down to 4.5 billion rupees following cuts to meet the IMF’s requirements for its latest bailout package. By comparison, ISRO’s budget is approximately $1.6 billion – meaning ISRO spends SUPARCO’s entire annual budget in four days.
The domestic case for scaling up space technology writes itself. Pakistan is chronically underequipped to manage its climate vulnerabilities, as seen from the catastrophic floods of 2022 that left one-third of Pakistan submerged. The new satellites are SUPARCO’s solution for disaster monitoring and response, urban and rural planning, agricultural monitoring, and glacier tracking, among other uses.
More importantly, from a security dimension, these satellites are Pakistan’s answer to India’s space program, although SUPARCO is still nowhere near ISRO yet. India’s space program has over 50 operating satellites. Its achievements include a Lunar South Pole landing in 2023, anti-satellite missile tests, and a fifth lunar mission on the books with Japan.
Amer Ahsan Gilani, the secretary of Pakistan Human Spaceflight Cooperation at SUPARCO, said, “Pakistan’s space program is in line with our national requirements; we are not in a race with contemporary countries.” The insistence that Pakistan is not in competition with unnamed rivals is telling.
Pakistan’s stakeholders need to make a choice now: prioritize the future or remain too distracted by domestic crises to build anything that lasts.
