A Pakistani astronaut will join the crew of China's Shenzhou 24 mission and become the first foreign national to board the country's space station, state media reported on Saturday.
The announcement came from the China Manned Space Agency and was carried by Xinhua, China's official news agency. The details were reported by The Associated Press, in a story carried by Phys.org.
The astronaut will fly a short mission on orbit as a payload specialist and return to Earth aboard Shenzhou 23. No launch date was given.
It would be the first joint flight involving Chinese and foreign astronauts in the history of China's crewed space programme.
The flight follows an agreement signed by China and Pakistan in February 2025. Two Pakistani candidates, Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, began training alongside their Chinese counterparts earlier this year, according to Xinhua. One of the two will be selected for the mission.
Their preparation concentrated on hands-on operational skills and included intensive Chinese language instruction.
The short visit sits inside a much larger programme. China is preparing for its first crewed lunar landing by 2030, while NASA aims to put astronauts back on the lunar surface in 2028. The United States remains China's principal rival in space.
Shenzhou 23, the craft that is to bring him home, launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in May.
The arrangement itself is a question of which vehicle happens to be docked. The visiting specialist is to arrive on Shenzhou 24 and leave on Shenzhou 23, the spacecraft that is already at the station.
This newspaper notes the consequence, which the agency did not address. The first foreign national to board China's space station will go up on Shenzhou 24 and come down on Shenzhou 23. Counted in spacecraft, the journey runs backwards.
Every other traveller on the programme has moved forward through the fleet, or has at least stayed level with it. The payload specialist will move down by one.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has restated the itinerary in the form the manifests require. It is a round trip whose return leg is numbered before its outbound leg. On the roll of Shenzhou 23 a passenger appears who was not aboard at launch.
Further questions follow. If the specialist returns on a craft that flew before he did, he will have logged a flight that precedes his own. His career will have to be read in the reverse of the order in which it happened.
Our analysts have therefore put a single request to the China Manned Space Agency, which is also the simplest test of the principle involved. If a visitor who launches on Shenzhou 24 may return on Shenzhou 23, the Department would like to know how far back a seat can be booked.