Pakistan's first space team fights custom laws and brain drain

The first Pakistani team takes flight

Muzamil sits down with Usaidul and Hamza, two final-year engineering students who are leading Pakistan’s only entry into the Spaceport America Cup. He opens by asking how a rocket team got born in a naval institute that explicitly rejected the original final-year project on grounds of scope and regulatory risk.

“In fact, we started this with some seniors,” Usaidul explains. “They wanted to do an FYP final year project which was related to rocket. Which got rejected due to being in a naval institute. It was that they didn’t get so much support. They thought the scope was too big.” The rejection stung, but instead of abandoning the idea, the seniors transferred the project into an informal team called Nust Rocket Team. Eventually Usaidul and Hamza joined and took it over.

Now they have a working design. The team has finished their design phase, run computational fluid dynamics analysis (CFD) on the rocket structure, performed stress testing, and started fabrication. Their structure is built from carbon fiber. Avionics bay includes a flight computer, barometer, gyroscope, and altimeter. The recovery system uses dual parachutes. The rocket is eight feet tall, weighs 33.6 kilograms with fuel, and is designed to reach 10,000 feet before the drogue parachute deploys.

The estimated cost is about 1 million Pakistani rupees.

One shot, no testing

What strikes Muzamil most is the engineering constraint that haunts the entire project. After all the design work, after the fabrication phase ends, there is one fundamental problem: “after the fabrication, you have one shot, right? Like you’re going to put it all together and it’s going to run, either it’s going to run or it’s not going to run. Because you can’t do tests. We can’t mitigate, this is a risk that we can’t mitigate because we can’t launch it, we can’t test it in Pakistan.”

Why not test at home? Pakistan’s custom laws classify solid propellant motors as destructive objects tied to missile technology. Importing them is illegal. “We use solid propelled motor. Solid propelled motor is used solid fuel and it is commercial. We can’t import it in Pakistan. This is a law, because of custom laws. I think these are destructive objects.”

This forces them to participate in a competition abroad where testing is possible. It also means the entire engineering cycle lives in a state of compressed risk: design, fabricate once, launch once, hope it works.

A dead space legacy

Muzamil pivots to history. He tells them Pakistan was the first country in South Asia to establish a space program, thanks to Dr. Abdus Salam. “From 1960 to 1970 to 1975, and in Pakistan we have launched 200 Sounding Rockets. Which is a huge amount. And in this, we were probably third.” Third in Asia and tenth globally. An extraordinary achievement for a young nation.

Then came politics and militarization. The program declined. Today, Pakistan’s Space Programme 2040 aims to launch only 11 satellites by 2040 with no domestic launch capability. India, by contrast, has signed agreements with 10 foreign countries to launch their satellites and has indigenous capability. The contrast is stark.

This history hangs over the NUST team like a ghost. They want to build what Pakistan once did. They want to create a culture where space ambition is normal, not aberrational.

Why engineers wait instead of build

Muzamil asks a harder question: Pakistan is full of engineering talent, yet many end up jobless or in call centers after IT degrees. Why don’t engineers create opportunities instead of waiting for them?

“The biggest mistake is that I have seen, I don’t know how bad I am or how bad I am, but I always see that they are running under innovation. If they have an idea, they always make something that is all different. Why? I don’t understand. You have to update the current, that’s what is going on in a little bit.” Hamza responds with frustration at the pattern. Engineers look for the next moonshot when they should be looking for gaps in the current industry.

He gives an example from his own internship at a speaker manufacturing factory. “I knew that there are perforated sheets required. I have checked out the whole Karachi only two people I met who were sitting in that machine. Only two people.” The market was huge, the supply was bottlenecked, yet nobody was building machines to solve it. That is the gap. That is where entrepreneurship lives.

Muzamil and Hamza discuss the triple helix model: academia, industry, and government working in sync. It works in Canada and the US. In Pakistan, it is broken. Universities don’t know what industry needs. Industry doesn’t recruit from universities. Government doesn’t fund research that leads anywhere. So talent sits idle or leaves.

Space as the next frontier

Muzamil makes a provocative comparison to history. “I would say that, in the 15th century, there were little European countries, who started to explore the entire country… If we get there early, maybe that could be our next turning point for us as well.”

The space sector touches everything: satellite internet for rural areas, Earth observation for agriculture, telecom infrastructure. Pakistan is still agricultural-based. Satellites for crop monitoring and land mapping could unlock billions. Yet when Usaidul and Hamza pitched this to an agriculture official, the response was cold: “it’s a Google map.”

There is also defense. Muzamil broaches the connection between space technology and missile defense. Usaidul concedes the linkage is there: “our technology is a lot of linked to the defense technology that they use.” But he frames defense differently. “S-400, that is Russia, it does that if there is any missile on you, then it will identify with automated radars and it will hit the precision. That is saving lives, that’s not killing people.”

Hope in chaos

As the conversation winds down, Muzamil asks where Usaidul stands on hope. The answer is immediate: “10. Very hopeful. Because i mean hopeful in a sense that i am seeing potential. I am aware that I know what is potential in my current generation.”

Muzamil counters with his own optimism about Pakistan’s future. “I feel that society will change because 10 years ago, no one was doing this. okay, you are saying that today in 21 years, I wasn’t doing this in 21 years, if you are thinking about this what happens is that there is power matrix at that moment.”

Gen Z rejects the extremism of the 1980s. They think differently. They see possibilities. In 10-20 years, when they enter positions of power, the country could look entirely different.

The episode ends with both guests offering final words. Usaidul asks parents to keep an open mind and let young people pursue what they want. Hamza’s message is simple: “make a sustainable world. And one, make a sustainable one. If anyone is working on this, please don’t stop it.”

Muzamil closes by saying he hopes one of them, or all of them, become pioneers of Pakistan’s space program. “Maybe we talk in 20 years, and you talk about how, you know, Mars Commission, Pakistan. But inshallah for that.”