New Delhi: A Bachelor of Science degree may be enough to head a space agency — in Pakistan. But there is a caveat. You have to be a Major General, serving or a retired one, with at least two stars. Since 2001, the chairman of SUPARCO has had four chiefs, and three of them have just about got a BSc degree. Only three-star major general Ahmed Bilal Husain has an MSc.
And India’s Chandrayaan-3 success has its rival neighbour Pakistan introspecting on the missteps in its own rather earth-bound space programme, SUPARCO or Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission. But that’s what happens when generals are in charge of lunar missions and space exploration.
Even Pakistani media, which reports on the Army with kid-gloves has made a note of this. In an editorial on India’s Space Quest, the national daily Dawn cites various reasons for the space programme remaining earth-bound.
“Among these include the fact that, particularly in the recent past, Pakistan’s space agency has been helmed by retired military men, not experts in the field,” it said.
On social media, Pakistani citizens have been quick to point this out as well questioning why the country’s generals are being put in charge of key institutions.
“…There is also threat in space ok,” said one X (formerly Twitter) user going on to explain that in the probability of an alien attack, civilian scientist would not be able to come to their defence.
“Obviously, the solution for Pakistan is to find a lieutenant general to lead SUPARCO. Major generals don’t seem up to the task,” Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume tweeted in response to a post listing the Major Generals.
The irony is that both India and Pakistan began their space programmes in the early 1960s. In fact, Pakistan was ahead of India when it launched a sounding rocket into space in 1962. It became the third such country in Asia to achieve this. And over the next decade, it launched more sounding rockets and introduced new programmes with the help of the United States of America and China.
But the programme started losing fuel with the rise of Zia-ul-Haq, and his fall out with Physics Nobel laureate Abdus Salam, who founded SUPARCO. The last non-army person to head SUPARCO was astrophysicist Abdul Majid who held the post of chairman from 1997 to 2001.
While ordinary Pakistani citizens have become more cynical about SUPARCO’s dreams, the country’s leaders are still thinking big. In 2019, when he was minister for science and technology, Fawad Chaudhry announced that Pakistan would send its “first person to space in 2022”.
He even went into details of how the person would be selected. “Fifty people will be shortlisted — list will then come down to 25 and in 2022, we will send our first person to space,” he said.
He was back in the news when he suggested in a tweet that Pakistan media should live telecast the Chandrayaan-III mission and the landing.
Social media influencers, too, were quick to capture reactions of the Pakistani public. When YouTuber Sohaib Chaudhry asked a Pakistani about his views on India’s moon mission, the response was hilarious: “We already live on the moon. Much like on the moon, essentials like water, gas, and electricity are lacking here, so there was no need to travel to the moon.”