The First Foreign Astronaut Will Reach Tiangong — and Come Home on a Different Ship

A Pakistani astronaut will fly to China's space station on Shenzhou-24 as a payload specialist, the country's human spaceflight agency said — the first time a foreign astronaut has joined a Chinese crewed mission.

The arrangement is unusual in one detail. The Pakistani specialist will fly up on Shenzhou-24 but come home on Shenzhou-23, which will still be docked. That means the station will see a “cross return”: the visitor and part of the older crew leave together, while the rest stay aboard. Shenzhou-24 is expected to launch from Jiuquan in late November, with the date set by the launch window.

The selection began in February 2025, when the two countries signed an agreement in Islamabad on choosing and training Pakistani astronauts. Two candidates emerged in April 2026 — Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud, both fighter pilots in the Pakistan Air Force — and both went to China for training that included intensive Chinese language work, spacecraft systems, adaptation to weightlessness and centrifuge runs at high g.

Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut and now a deputy chief designer of the programme, said in October that both had performed very well and were training alongside Chinese crew members. One will fly; the other will serve as backup.

A payload specialist is not a pilot. The role covers operating, maintaining and repairing experiments and equipment aboard the station, running the science, and collecting and analysing the data. It does not include flying the spacecraft or operating the station itself — on this mission the Pakistani astronaut will concentrate on Pakistan's own experiments.

That division of labour is why the mission can work with a visitor at all. Handing a scientist a seat is a much smaller commitment than training a foreign pilot to fly the vehicle, and it is the usual path for space agencies opening their stations to partners: first the experiments, then the people who run them.