The recent launch of Chandrayaan 2 mission by India has been widely acclaimed across global nations, including renowned space agencies like NASA. The Chandrayaan 2 mission seems to have also inspired Pakistan as right after its successful launch, Pakistan’s Minister for Science and Technology, Fawad Chaudry, announced how they are planning operations to send first man to space by 2022. He added that the selection process of the astronaut would initiate from 2020 and the tallest person in the country shall be selected for the mission. When asked the reason behind selecting the tallest person of the country, Mr. Chaudry said, “I don’t know why the tallest person, but we’re sure that we will select only the tallest person.”
Aishkar-e-Touba, a popular militant group, welcomed the decision of Mr. Choudhry and added that the space mission would be incomplete without an explosion on the moon. Unsafe-ud-din, the leader of the group, revealed to The Fauxy that he wants Pakistan to be the first country to carry out explosion on the moon. Further, he added, “We know that there is no atmosphere on the moon and the gravity is low there. However, our R&D team will carry out rigorous research to come up with bombs capable of exploding even in low gravity environments.”
The Pakistan government, which is already facing a huge financial crunch at the moment, ridiculed all the claims related to space missions and clarified that it is actually China who is planning a space mission, and since there is a vacant seat in their spacecraft, Pakistan authorities requested (read begged) them to accommodate one Pakistani citizen in order to claim that a person from Pakistan has also been to the moon, no matter whose space mission it was.
