Pakistan to send first astronaut to space in 2026; project is handled by..., what is SUPARCO and who was Nobel Prize-winning Abdus Salam?
New Delhi: Just a few weeks back, Group Captain and Test Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of the Indian Air Force (IAF) became the second Indian to go to space. The first Indian to travel to space was Rakesh Sharma, also from the IAF, who made India proud in April 1984. Shubhanshu Shukla was the mission pilot for Axiom Mission 4 and the first ISRO astronaut to visit the International Space Station (ISS).
Now, it seems like the 'not so friendly' neighbourhood Pakistan wants to emulate the feat, as the news of the country's preparation to blast off one of its citizens to the Chinese space station in 2026.
No prizes for guessing that! What is Pakistan's space programme, and what is SUPARCO?
Going back to India, it has its space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which was set up in 1962 by the Government of India, and since then, it has achieved numerous milestones.
As for Pakistan, its space agency SUPARCO (Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission), was started in 1961, which means even before India. The China National Space Administration (CNSA), the space agency of China, was established in 1993. Given the fact that Pakistan has lagged by a very long distance.
Pakistan's SUPARCO launched its first rocket, 'Rahbar-1', in 1962, which was a big achievement at that time. In 1990, it launched its first satellite, 'Badar-1', with the help of China. That was the last significant programme undertaken by Islamabad.
A big credit for the establishment and success of SUPARCO goes to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Abdus Salam. Who was Abdus Salam?
Mohammad Abdus Salam was a Pakistani theoretical physicist who was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and the first scientist from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize.
Salam was the scientific advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology in Pakistan from 1960 to 1974. He played a major and influential role in the development of the country's science infrastructure. Salam contributed to numerous developments in theoretical and particle physics in Pakistan.
Abdus Salam was the founding director of the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) and was responsible for the establishment of the Theoretical Physics Group (TPG). He is viewed as the 'scientific father' of this program. What kind of problems is SUPARCO facing?
For any programme of such a big magnitude, it is a given that it will require loads of funding, which SUPARCO did not receive from the Pakistani government. This hurt the space agency as well as its space programme. How serious it is about Space Science can be gauged from the fact that the annual budget of SUPARCO is only $36 million, which is peanuts.
What is even more surprising is that for the last 11 years, retired army officers and generals have been running the agency, which should have been under the patronage of space scientists and professionals from related fields. There are fewer space-related courses in education, due to which skilled people are not being prepared.
Space research in Pakistan suffered due to the focus on the nuclear programme and dependence on China. Pakistan launched three satellites in recent years, but all with Chinese help.
The same is the story with the first Pakistani astronaut in 2026, who is also scheduled to be dependent on China's space station.
Two Pakistani astronauts will undergo trained in China.
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(Laasya is an Independent Journalist with bylines published in BBC, Thomson Reuters and Mongabay India among a dozen others. One day she is tracking climate finance; the next, she's decoding education reforms, dissecting caste realities or tracing wildlife in forgotten forests.)
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