Pakistan’s First Astronaut to Fly to China’s Tiangong Space Station on November 25 Aboard Shenzhou-24

Introduction

Pakistan is preparing to send one of its own citizens into space for the first time, and the flight is now only weeks away. Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal announced on October 19, 2026 that the country’s first astronaut would travel to China’s Tiangong space station on November 25, aboard the Shenzhou-24 crewed spacecraft. Two Pakistani pilots have been training in Beijing since April, and one of them will be chosen for the seat. The mission will last about a week, during which the selected astronaut will work as a payload specialist and carry out experiments designed by Pakistani researchers. It is a short stay by the standards of professional spaceflight, but for Pakistan it is a milestone that has been decades in the making, and the first time a foreign national will board the Chinese station. The Pakistan first astronaut Tiangong November 25 2026 mission is short in days but long in preparation, and it carries a first that Pakistan has waited decades to claim.

1. A first for Pakistan: the November 25 flight

1.1 The announcement from Narowal

The date was set out in public by Ahsan Iqbal, Pakistan’s federal planning minister, at the closing ceremony of World Space Week in Narowal on October 19, 2026. State-run Radio Pakistan reported his announcement that the first astronaut would fly on November 25, and the news was carried the same day by Dawn and other Pakistani outlets. Iqbal also used the occasion to set out wider ambitions, saying Pakistan was targeting a landing on the Moon by 2035. The announcement gave the programme something it had not had before: a firm date on the calendar, less than six weeks away, and a public commitment from a senior minister that the flight would happen this year. Earlier reporting had pointed only to a launch window in October or November, so the November 25 date sharpened a timetable that had been deliberately vague for months.

1.2 What “first astronaut” means for the country

Pakistan has had a space agency, the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, known as SUPARCO, since the early 1960s, and it has put satellites into orbit with foreign help. It has never sent a person into space. The country has no launch vehicle of its own capable of carrying a crew, and no crewed spacecraft of its own, so the first Pakistani in orbit will fly on a Chinese rocket, in a Chinese spacecraft, to a Chinese station, after training with Chinese instructors. That dependence does not diminish the moment at home, where the flight is being presented as a national first on the scale of the country’s early satellite launches. For the two pilots in Beijing, the distinction is more personal: only one of them will fly, and the other will have trained for months for a seat that does not exist.

2. The two pilots competing for one seat

2.1 Muhammad Zeeshan Ali of the Pakistan Air Force

One of the two candidates is Muhammad Zeeshan Ali, a pilot of the Pakistan Air Force. He was chosen in February 2026 after a selection process that ran for about a year, and he formally entered training on April 24, 2026, a date chosen to coincide with China Space Day. Reporting on the programme describes the two candidates as fighter pilots who have spent the months since then memorising Mandarin, spinning through centrifuge drills, and learning to eat, sleep and troubleshoot hardware while weightless. Zeeshan Ali’s background is in military flying, the same route that has supplied most of the world’s early astronauts, and his training has been built around the systems of the Shenzhou spacecraft and the Tiangong station rather than around flying the vehicle itself.

2.2 Khurram Daud of the Pakistan Navy

The other candidate is Khurram Daud, a pilot of the Pakistan Navy. He went through the same selection process and entered training on the same day in April, and he has been training alongside Zeeshan Ali in Beijing ever since. The two men were picked from a field that was screened against strict acceptance criteria set by SUPARCO and Chinese aerospace medical authorities, and both have been put through the same programme of language study, physical conditioning and systems training. Only one will board Shenzhou-24. The other will remain in the programme, and the reporting so far has not said what role the pilot who is not selected will play, or whether he will be first in line for a later flight. That silence is part of the reason the final weeks before launch carry so much attention in Pakistan.

3. Training in Beijing: Mandarin, centrifuges and weightlessness

3.1 The China Astronaut Research and Training Center

The two pilots have been training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing, the same institution that prepares China’s own astronauts. Their programme has covered the systems they will use aboard Tiangong, the procedures for living and working in weightlessness, and the emergency drills that every crew member must be able to perform without thinking. The training is described in reporting as intensive, and it has run without a break since the candidates arrived in China in April. Pakistan’s ambassador to China confirmed in August that both candidates were in training and that one of them was expected to board Shenzhou-24 in about 90 days, a timetable that points to the same late-November window the minister later announced.

3.2 Learning to work in Mandarin

One of the hardest parts of the training has had nothing to do with flying. The Shenzhou spacecraft and the Tiangong station operate in Mandarin, and the Pakistani astronaut will have to communicate with the crew and with mission control in the language. The candidates have been memorising Mandarin alongside their technical training, a demand that sets this mission apart from most international flights, where English is the working language of the station. The language requirement is also a measure of how fully the Pakistani astronaut will be folded into the Chinese crew: he will not be a passenger carried along for the ride, but a working member of the team who must understand orders, read checklists and report problems in the crew’s own language.

4. The Shenzhou-24 mission and the road to Tiangong

4.1 The Long March 2F and Jiuquan

The flight to the station will begin at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in northwestern China, the same site from which every Chinese crewed mission has flown. The Shenzhou-24 spacecraft will ride a Long March 2F rocket, the launcher that has carried every Shenzhou crew since the programme began. The Shenzhou design traces its lineage to the Russian Soyuz, but it is larger, with a separate orbital module that gives the crew extra room for experiments and living space. Reporting in September put the launch in an October to November window, and the minister’s later announcement fixed it to November 25. The selected astronaut will not return to Pakistan before the launch: he will travel directly from training in China to the launch site, and will return home only after a recovery period following the return to Earth.

4.2 Docking with the Tianhe core module

Once in orbit, Shenzhou-24 will dock with Tiangong’s Tianhe core module, the central hub of the station. Tiangong, whose name means Heavenly Palace, is a modular outpost in low Earth orbit, operating at roughly 340 to 450 kilometres above the Earth. The Pakistani payload specialist is expected to spend about a week aboard the station, a fraction of the roughly six-month rotations served by career Chinese crew members. The short stay reflects the purpose of the flight: it is a first step, a chance to put a Pakistani researcher to work in orbit and bring the experience home, rather than a long-duration expedition. The crew already aboard the station will have their own programme running, and the visitor’s week will be fitted around it.

5. The payload specialist’s job: four experiments in a week

5.1 Biotechnology chosen from more than 300 proposals

The Pakistani astronaut will fly as a payload specialist, a role focused on conducting scientific experiments rather than flying the spacecraft. It is the same category China introduced for its first civilian astronaut, Gui Haichao of Beihang University, who flew aboard Shenzhou-16 in 2023. Four biotechnology experiments, selected from more than 300 proposals submitted by Pakistani universities, will be carried out during the roughly one-week stay, according to reporting on the programme. The experiments were picked by Chinese institutes, and they are described as work that could help combat food insecurity and climate change. The wider programme also covers material science, fluid physics and life science, and the experiments chosen for the flight sit inside that broader research agenda.

5.2 Why a week matters for the science

A week in orbit is short, but for the kind of research planned it is enough to matter. Experiments in microgravity can show in days what would take far longer to test on the ground, because the absence of gravity changes how fluids move, how crystals grow and how living cells behave. The four biotechnology experiments will be run in the station’s laboratory facilities, and the results will be brought back for analysis in Pakistan. The value of the flight, as the programme’s supporters describe it, is not only in the data from four experiments. It is in the fact that Pakistani researchers designed the work, a Pakistani astronaut will carry it out, and the experience of running science in orbit will come home with him. That, more than any single result, is what the programme is meant to build.

6. Tiangong and China’s post-ISS coalition

6.1 What the station is

Tiangong is China’s answer to the International Space Station, and it is now the centrepiece of the country’s human spaceflight programme. The station is modular, built around the Tianhe core module, and it hosts crews on rotations of about six months. Shenzhou-23, which launched on May 24, 2026, carried mission commander Zhu Yangzhu, pilot Zhang Zhiyuan and payload specialist Li Jiaying, who made history as the first astronaut from Hong Kong. One of the Shenzhou-23 crew members has been designated to remain aboard Tiangong for a year-long spaceflight experiment, a sign of how the station’s programme is lengthening. Tiangong operates in low Earth orbit and is the only station besides the International Space Station currently hosting crews.

6.2 The first foreign national aboard

The Pakistani astronaut will be the first foreign national ever to board Tiangong, according to reporting on the mission. That distinction is deliberate on China’s part. As the International Space Station ages and its future becomes uncertain, China has been building a coalition of partners around its own station, offering flights to countries that have no crewed programme of their own. Pakistan is the first to take up that offer in person, and its flight is being watched as a test of whether Tiangong can become a genuinely international station rather than a purely Chinese one. Other countries are reported to be in discussion with Beijing about similar flights, but none has yet put an astronaut aboard.

7. The February 2025 agreement and the road so far

7.1 SUPARCO and the China Manned Space Agency

The mission rests on a formal agreement signed on February 28, 2025 between SUPARCO and the China Manned Space Agency. The agreement committed the two agencies to prepare a Pakistani astronaut for a flight to Tiangong, and it set in motion the selection process that took about a year. The two candidates emerged from that process in February 2026 and formally entered training on April 24, 2026. The agreement is part of a much wider space relationship between the two countries, one that straddles the Belt and Road Initiative and has already produced Chinese-launched Pakistani satellites and a joint satellite-navigation system. The astronaut flight is the most visible part of that relationship, and the one that carries the most public attention at home.

7.2 Satellites, navigation and the Chang’e-8 rover

The cooperation does not stop with the astronaut flight. Pakistan is also collaborating with China on a lunar rover that is due to fly on China’s Chang’e-8 mission around 2028, and the Pakistani-built rover would be the country’s first hardware on the surface of another world. The planning minister has said Pakistan is targeting a landing of its own on the Moon by 2035, a date that is ambitious for a country that has never launched a person into orbit. Whether that target is realistic will depend on what the Tiangong flight teaches SUPARCO about training, operations and the management of a crewed programme, and on whether the partnership with China continues to deepen after this first flight returns.

8. What remains unconfirmed and what to watch next

8.1 The final selection

The biggest unanswered question is the simplest one: which of the two pilots will fly. Reporting in September said a final selection decision was expected in mid-to-late October 2026, according to SUPARCO’s Amer Gilani. No public announcement of the choice had been reported by the time the November 25 date was confirmed, and the two candidates were still described as training side by side. Until the name is announced, both men remain in contention, and the decision itself will be a moment of national attention when it comes. The exact launch time on November 25, the composition of the rest of the Shenzhou-24 crew, and the detailed list of the four experiments have also not been published.

8.2 What to watch next

The coming weeks will answer the questions in order. First, the announcement of the selected astronaut, which should come before the launch and will end months of speculation between the two pilots. Then the launch itself on November 25, from Jiuquan, and the docking with Tiangong. Then a week of experiments, carried out in orbit and reported back to Pakistan, and finally the return to Earth and the recovery period that follows. After that, the questions will turn to what comes next: whether the pilot who does not fly gets a later seat, whether Pakistan seeks a second flight, and whether the lunar ambitions set out by the planning minister begin to take concrete shape. The coming weeks will provide the answers.

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