Pakistan’s First Astronaut Flies From China on November 25, With a Moon Landing Targeted for 2035

NAROWAL: Pakistan’s first astronaut finally has a date. Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal told the closing ceremony of World Space Week in Narowal on Sunday that the country’s first astronaut will embark on a space mission from China’s space centre on November 25. Cooperation with China, he said, would help Pakistan reach new heights in space research. The date is the minister’s announcement; the final crew assignment from China’s manned space agency is still to come.

A week aboard Tiangong

The preparation is practical, not rhetorical. Two Pakistani pilots, Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, have trained as astronauts in Beijing, covering spacecraft operations, communication in Chinese and preparation for conditions in orbit. One of them is expected to spend about a week aboard China’s Tiangong space station as a payload specialist, running experiments in material science, biotechnology and life sciences. The flight sits inside the bilateral astronaut cooperation agreement signed in February 2025, and the same partnership is expected to put a Pakistani-built lunar rover on China’s Chang’e 8 mission around 2028.

A 2035 target, and a museum in Narowal

Iqbal used the same ceremony to set the next marker: Pakistan aims to land on the Moon by 2035. Satellite technology, he argued, now runs through agriculture, communications, climate monitoring, education and national security, and a country that stops doing research falls behind in development as well. To build that curiosity at home, he announced Pakistan’s first space museum and a centre for advanced technology at the University of Narowal — the university that recently took first position at the Islamabad Science Festival. The real question is no longer the date but the follow-through. If November 25 holds, Pakistan joins the short list of countries whose citizens have worked in orbit, and the 2035 goal stops being a line in a speech.