It was, by any measure, a familiar tableau of diplomatic theatre. A Pakistani minister standing beside Chinese officials, watching a rocket arc into the sky. Yet when Ahsan Iqbal declared that the successful launch of the EO-2 satellite was not merely a technological handover but the “vision of a rising Pakistan,” the rhetoric felt less like hyperbole and more like an epitaph for a long provincial adolescence. For a country that entered the space age with remarkable precocity—only to spend decades in low earth orbit—this was not just another launch. It was evidence of a second act. To understand the weight of the moment, one must sift through the sedimentary layers of Pakistan’s scientific ambition.
It is a story that begins not in Beijing, but in Karachi, 1961. At a time when the word “satellite” still conjured Sputnik and the space race was the exclusive preserve of superpowers, Pakistan established SUPARCO. It was an audacious gamble for a young nation still stitching together its federation. With assistance from NASA, Pakistan launched its Rehbar sounding rockets, becoming only the third Asian nation—after Japan and Israel—to venture beyond the atmosphere. For a brief window, Islamabad looked west, towards American laboratories and European launchpads. Then the skies went quiet. Through the 1970s and 80s, the program existed in a state of suspended animation. Budgets were meagre; vision was deferred.
When Badr-I finally launched in 1990, it was Pakistan’s first satellite—but it arrived a decade late, a solitary firework in a dark expanse. The 1990s brought nuclear tests but no satellites. The 2000s brought political turbulence but few orbits. For nearly half a century, Pakistan remained a space-faring nation in name only: the infrastructure existed, the scientists trained, but the trajectory was flat. That stasis has now, unmistakably, broken. The launch of EO-2 is the fourth such mission in recent memory, following PakSAT-1R in 2011, PakTES-1A in 2018, and the multi-mission satellite of 2024. However, to focus solely on the hardware is to miss the more profound shift. For the first time, Pakistan is not merely purchasing satellites off the shelf; it is building them.
The EO-2 was not assembled in a distant factory and delivered by cargo plane. Pakistani engineers co-developed the satellite alongside their Chinese counterparts, working shoulder-to-shoulder in clean rooms, writing code, testing subsystems. The distinction between buyer and apprentice has blurred into something more equitable. This is the difference between renting a car and learning to drive. None of this would be legible without Beijing. China’s role in Pakistan’s space renaissance cannot be reduced to a simple donor-recipient ledger; it is far more architectural than that. While the United States and Europe erected barriers to technology transfer in the name of non-proliferation, China offered the keys to the workshop. Between 2019 and 2024 alone, the two countries signed twelve formal agreements on space cooperation.
China has not just launched Pakistan’s satellites; it has trained more than two hundred of its space professionals, established three joint research and development centers, and integrated Pakistani scientists into the rhythms of its own lunar ambitions. The results are measurable. When China’s Chang’e-6 probe departed for the far side of the Moon last year, it carried aboard a Pakistani cubesat—a device the size of a shoebox, yet heavy with symbolism. Pakistan became one of a handful of nations to place an object in lunar orbit. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, meanwhile, has worked directly with SUPARCO on microsatellite development, providing technical support for Pakistan’s inaugural lunar imagery.
These are not acts of charity. They are investments in a partner capable, eventually, of reciprocating. The texture of this cooperation is also becoming more human. In Islamabad this February, Pakistani researchers crowded into a forum hosted by Chinese space authorities, listening to taikonaut Ye Guangfu describe life aboard the Tiangong space station. The scene was remarkable not for its grandeur but for its intimacy. This was not a press conference or a ribbon-cutting; it was a seminar. Chinese engineers are no longer distant figures in mission control—they are colleagues, advisors, and co-authors of a shared scientific literature. Then there is the astronaut. By late 2026, if schedules hold, a Pakistani pilot will board a spacecraft and dock with China’s orbital outpost.
It will be the first time a Pakistani has travelled beyond the stratosphere. The selection process is already underway; the training modules have been designed. For a generation raised on grainy footage of Neil Armstrong, the promise of one of their own crossing the Kármán line is not abstract. It is the demystification of the heavens. All of this, however, must be held in clear-eyed perspective. The same government that projects a moon landing by 2035 allocates SUPARCO a budget of roughly twenty-six million dollars—a fraction of what India invests in its space program each week. The disparity is not merely numerical; it is existential. Indian spacecraft orbit Mars while Pakistani engineers ration computing power.
The Vision-2047 plan, which envisions a fleet of eleven satellites, is ambitious only if the treasury agrees to fund it. Ambition without appropriation is a museum piece. Yet there is something quietly subversive in Pakistan’s approach. While New Delhi tests anti-satellite weapons and frames space as a contested domain, Islamabad has positioned itself as an apostle of the orbital commons. It speaks not of dominance but of disaster management, not of militarization but of food security. The EO-2 satellite will monitor glacier recession in the north, track crop yields in the Punjab, and map urban sprawl in Karachi. In an era of space weaponization, Pakistan has chosen to weaponize nothing—and that restraint, however born of necessity, carries its own moral heft.
The deeper question, perhaps, is what this journey signifies for a country so often defined by its crises. For decades, Pakistan’s national story has been written in the language of security and survival. The space program offers a competing vocabulary: one of patience, precision, and long horizons. It suggests that the same society capable of volatility is also capable of sustained scientific endeavor. The engineers at SUPARCO do not build rockets to win wars; they build them to irrigate fields and predict floods. This is the quiet revolution unfolding above our heads. The EO-2 satellite now traces an arc from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea, its sensors drinking in light and rendering the invisible visible. It will not make headlines. It will not alter the balance of power.
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