Pakistan abandons its space race with India to put an astronaut in orbit in 2022

Pakistan's Minister of Science and Technology, Fawad Chaudhry, has confirmed that the Islamabad government has decided to delay its plans to send a Chinese astronaut into space in 2022. The Pakistani Air Force and the Pakistani and Chinese space agencies have had to temporarily abandon the initial stages of the process initiated last February to select a first group of 50 astronaut candidate officers.

The list was to be reduced to 25 people, of whom between four and six would eventually be designated to travel to the Manned Flight Centre in Beijing. In the Chinese capital, all of them would follow a training course, a previous step to fly on board a space capsule with a couple of Chinese astronauts. In this way, Pakistan intended to win the race it has with India to place its flag in space. But those plans have been thwarted and temporarily halted.

Instead, the four Indian candidates pre-selected to travel around the Earth or to the International Space Station in 2022 have resumed their live training in mid-May at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training, Research and Test Centre near Moscow.

The 12-month technical and biomedical training course, which began in Russia on February 10, is part of the Gaganyaan manned flight program. All of them are pilots of the Indian Air Force, and they have to pass several training cycles dedicated to know how to use the systems of the Soyuz spacecraft, to know the life in orbit and to survive in case of a descent of the capsule in the sea or in isolated areas. 

The course had been limited to telematic sessions since mid-March, when the Russian Federal Space Agency's (Roscosmos) health security and distancing measures to deal with the coronavirus COVID-19 were activated. There are two main reasons for the suspension of the astronaut selection programme by the Pakistani government under Prime Minister Imran Khan. First, the impact of the pandemic on the more than 205 million people, with about 130,000 affected and nearly 2,500 officially recognized deaths. Secondly, the significant drop in exports and the lack of sufficient economic resources to cope with the ambitious project.

The Minister of Science, Fawad Chaudhry, was confident that he had reached an agreement with the Union of Arab Emirates months ago. Pakistan intends to launch a joint space programme, a way to receive financial support for its first manned flight to the cosmos. The aforementioned agreement has not yet become a reality, nor has the one that seeks to establish a technology park in collaboration with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's private industry, an initiative that seeks to increase the strength of the national space sector and which is currently being negotiated.

Elected Prime Minister in August 2018, Imran Khan -a famous former cricketer- had taken the decision to emulate India's space flight program by the end of 2018, which he negotiated with the Prime Minister of the State Council of China, Li Keqiang, during his visit to Beijing in November of that year.

His intentions were reaffirmed in July 2019, following the launch of the Indian mission Chandrayaan-2 to the moon. In October 2019, on the occasion of a further official visit by Imran Khan to Beijing, during which he also met President Xi Jinping, the Pakistani Space Agency signed a contract for the training of astronauts with the Chinese state-owned company responsible for space cooperation.

The historical struggle between India and Pakistan extends to all spheres, despite the fact that Islamabab authorities deny that they have any competition with New Delhi in space matters. One example of how the dispute between the two countries has crossed land borders is provided by manned flights. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed in the summer of 2018 that an astronaut would be placed in orbit in 2022 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the country's independence. In October of the same year, Imran Khan announced that a Pakistani astronaut would also fly across the cosmos in 2022.

Nuclear powers in both cases, both countries also have their respective space agencies. The government agency in New Delhi is called the Indian Space Research Agency (ISRO) and the one in Islamabab is called the Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO).

Each of them has different programmes underway, with the New Delhi programme being much more developed. It has an important space sector and autonomy to place satellites in orbit thanks to its own launchers, called PSLV and GSLV. This is not the case in Pakistan, which has a much less developed industry, no rockets of its own and is totally dependent on foreign aid, mainly from China, to place the few satellites it has in orbit and those it can finance in the future.