ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — A Pakistani astronaut will fly to China’s Tiangong space station on the Shenzhou-24 mission, becoming the first foreign national to visit the station and the first non-Chinese crew member in the history of China’s crewed space programme, the China Manned Space Agency said on Saturday.
The astronaut will fly as a payload specialist and, after a short stay in orbit, will return to Earth aboard the Shenzhou-23 spacecraft, the agency said. It is the first joint flight of Chinese and foreign astronauts since China began sending people into space.
China has not said who will fly or when the mission will launch. Two Pakistani pilots, Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, have been training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing since April. Both passed their assessments, and one has now been assigned to the flight while the other will serve as backup, the agency said.
How they were chosen: the selection began after Pakistan and China signed a space cooperation agreement in Islamabad in February last year, and went through three stages: initial screening, a second evaluation and final confirmation. When the mission was first announced, the agency said the Pakistani astronaut would help with daily work on board and carry out scientific experiments for Pakistan.
Since it began operating in 2021, Tiangong has hosted only Chinese astronauts. The agency also unveiled the Shenzhou-24 mission emblem, which shows a spacecraft docking with the station against the Earth, with a motif drawn from a dragon-patterned jade arc and the marks “2026” and “SZ-24”.
The flight will be Pakistan’s biggest step yet in a space partnership with China that sent its first satellite to the Moon aboard China’s Chang’e-6 mission in 2024.
