Pakistan\u2019s space agency says two of the country\u2019s pilots, Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Dawood, are undergoing special training at China\u2019s astronaut training centre in Beijing so that one of them can be selected for a trip to the Tiangong space station.<\/p>\n
Under the announcement, the final decision on the selection of the Pakistani astronaut is due in mid- to late October 2026. The chosen candidate will be sent into orbit as a \u201cpayload specialist\u201d and will be responsible for carrying out Pakistan\u2019s scientific experiments, rather than piloting the spacecraft.<\/p>\n
The mission is part of China-Pakistan space cooperation that has been in development since 2019. According to officials from Pakistan\u2019s space agency, the partnership is not limited to this flight and also includes joint projects in satellites, navigation systems and future space missions.<\/p>\n
Aamer Gilani, head of human space cooperation at SUPARCO, said the selected person will not return to Pakistan before launch and will depart directly on the space mission after completing training in China. He added that after returning to Earth, the individual will first undergo a recovery period and then head back to the country.<\/p>\n
Training for the two pilots includes intensive Mandarin language lessons, familiarisation with spacecraft systems, centrifuge exercises, adaptation to weightlessness and tolerance of the pressures caused by launch acceleration. Aazar Ansari, SUPARCO\u2019s director of artificial intelligence, said that because it is difficult to find people able to withstand extreme acceleration, the two candidates were chosen for the programme because of their background in high-speed flights.<\/p>\n
Four biotechnology experiments were selected for the flight from 300 university proposals. According to officials at the agency, the aim of the experiments is to look for solutions related to food insecurity and climate change, and the projects are being prepared and pre-tested in SUPARCO laboratories before being sent to Chinese engineers for final approval.<\/p>\n
According to the published details, the Pakistani astronaut will travel to orbit aboard a Chinese-built spacecraft from a Chinese base and will work in a Mandarin-speaking environment. Pakistan currently does not have an independent launch vehicle or a domestically built crewed spacecraft, and the astronaut\u2019s stay on the space station is expected to last one week.<\/p>\n
The Tiangong space station is a three-module, 77-tonne station used for scientific experiments in areas including life sciences, materials, fluid physics, combustion and radiation. According to published information, the station has so far hosted more than 180 scientific experiments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistan is training two pilots in China for its first crewed mission to the Tiangong space station.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}