Why did Pakistan fall behind India in the space race despite a head start?

In the summer of 1961, Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan arrived in the US on a state visit amid an escalating great-power competition. The Soviets had just blasted off the first cosmonaut to space after already becoming the first country to place a satellite into orbit a few years earlier. Reeling from a bruised ego, the US president John F. Kennedy zealously declared that an American would be the first to step on the Moon.

At the time, Khan was accompanied by his chief scientific advisor Abdus Salam - a theoretical physicist who was a rising star in the international scientific community. During the visit, Salam received word that he was invited to the NASA headquarters in Washington DC. He phoned his trusted protege Tariq Mustafa, a twenty-seven-year old mechanical engineer who was working as a visiting fellow at an atomic research facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, asking him to join the meeting. Mustafa flew to DC the next morning, where they met with the NASA Assistant Administrator International Affairs Arnold Frutkin.

That day, the NASA official made an offer they could hardly believe: the Americans were preparing to launch the Apollo missions to the Moon, but they were confronted with an “information blackhole” regarding wind conditions in the upper atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. Frutkin proposed that Pakistan launch a rocket with American support, which included training and essential equipment such as rocket motors, over their territory and share data from experiments conducted at heights of up to 160 kilometers.

The nine-month period leading up to the launch of Rehbar-1 - Pakistan’s first indigenously assembled solid-fuel rocket - was a whirlwind mission, recalls Mustafa, 89, who headed the Pakistani team of scientists and engineers.

“We cut red tape, that was most unusual. I don't think many developing countries could have done that. I wrote that report overnight, I could choose my team and get them to NASA’s Wallops Island Range. Even the Americans were stunned. They never expected that we would be able to finish this within nine months before the 1962 monsoons,” he tells TRT World.

From procuring equipment to shipping them to Pakistan to building its first ever rocket range in a military facility along the Sonmiani coast in Balochistan - the Pakistanis pulled off the launch just before the weather window closed with the arrival of the rainy season. At the time, Pakistan became the only South Asian nation, and the third in Asia after Japan and Israel, to have accomplished this.

No mean feat

The Americans were quite stunned that Pakistan - a country that did not even have a dedicated space agency at the time - was able to successfully launch a rocket in just nine months.

There were other countries along the Indian Ocean who received the same offer from NASA. It would take India another year to launch a sounding rocket in 1963 to explore the upper atmosphere.

But while NASA was engaging Abdus Salam, New Delhi was still ahead of its neighbour when it comes to how much it spent on science and technology.

“When this invitation was given (to us), India was way ahead in terms of its science culture, population, resources, everything,” says Tariq Mustafa.

India benefited from a functioning bureaucracy left behind by the British in 1947. Even before that, India had a prevalent science culture, which included a number of universities and research institutes such as the TATA Institute of Fundamental Research, Mustafa argues. The Indians established their atomic energy commission in 1947 - nine years before Pakistan stepped into the nuclear arena.

Hence, it was surprising how Pakistan could leap ahead of India in 1962.

Throughout the 1960s, Pakistan made a number of strides in its rocket programme. The Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) was conceived in 1961 by Salam, who notably went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his contribution to the Electroweak Unification Theory of Physics.

SUPARCO set up the country’s first rocket manufacturing plant in Karachi in 1967, which led to the successful launches of the Rehnuma and Shahpar series of indigenously produced rockets by 1969. The Americans viewed Pakistan’s pursuit of rocket technology with suspicion, and hence extended little support.

Consequently, an Instrumentation Laboratory was established at the Karachi plant which set the stage for SUPARCO’s satellite programme.

How Pakistan fell behind

With an impressive beginning, Pakistan was on track to assume prominence in the international space sector.

But if any SUPARCO official would have looked up into the sky with a telescope last month, he would have felt light years behind India.

On August 23, the India Space Research Organization - an agency that was formed nine years after SUPARCO’s establishment - successfully landed the Chandrayaan-3 rover on the Moon’s south pole, putting a spotlight on SUPARCO’s lackluster performance.

Since the 1980s, SUPARCO has placed a series of communications and remote sensing satellites into orbit, mostly with the help of China, and also has a Space Vision 2047 - a plan to send more satellites into space for aiding civilian and military pursuits. Still, the space agency has no big-ticket achievements to publicly boast of.

Many netizens attributed the downfall of SUPARCO to the Pakistan Army’s iron grip on top management positions in public-sector organisations, often to accommodate retired officers and exercise influence indirectly. In the last 20 years, four two-star generals have presided over the space agency.

But Adil Sultan, dean of faculty for the Aerospace and Strategic Studies programme at the Islamabad-based Air University, says that heightened tensions with India, particularly after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, and the Indian nuclear test in 1974, primarily contributed to slowing Pakistan's space programme.

“Scientists with space-related knowledge could have possibly delivered, but since the focus was mostly towards the military aspects of space, therefore, the limited developments that took place in SUPARCO were in the form of working on missiles and improving space situational awareness from the military angle,” he says.

Therefore, Pakistan’s scarce resources were diverted from the space programme into building missiles and the nuclear bomb. Even SUPARCO redirected its focus on aiding the defence sector.

Meanwhile, Pakistani defense entities, including SUPARCO, faced international sanctions at various times in the 1970s to block Islamabad’s nuclear pursuit, and in the 1990s when it conducted nuclear tests. Pakistan also faced international isolation when its top nuclear scientist AQ Khan was caught up in a proliferation network.

“The technologies used in space launch vehicles and ballistic missiles are similar. Due to the concerns over missile proliferation, several countries were reluctant to help Pakistan's space programme,” says Sultan.

India, however, continued to receive support from the Soviet Union in its space and nuclear programme. And it was able to avert sanctions due to its status as a non-aligned country during the Cold War.

For Pakistan, sanctions meant that materials needed for developing space missions and missile programmes were not freely available. Gray-market procurements were costly and time-consuming.

Islamabad had a window of opportunity in the 1980s to revive its space ambition when it became a US ally against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and received substantial aid and concessions from Washington.

However, SUPARCO lost out to competition from heavily-funded army-run defense production entities which got the bulk of defense contracts. This changed when former military administrator Pervez Musharraf pledged to revive the civilian space programme in 2000.

Yet, the agency, placed under the military’s Strategic Plans Division, still carries out research and development activities for missile engines, builds artillery rockets and missile testing ranges, according to Umair Aslam, head of Islamabad-based defense publication Global Defense Insight. It provides satellite imagery for surveillance and reconnaissance purposes, which can be used to monitor borders and enemy hideouts, he says.

India has leaped ahead of Pakistan with the Moon landing. Now even private Indian companies are gearing up to build their own rockets.

But Pakistanis can take heart knowing that they might have missed the race to the Moon but they still managed to cover a long way, says Mustafa.