The government has decided to set up Pakistan Space center near Rawalpindi. The project envisages achieving self-reliance in indigenous development, manufacturing, assembly, integration and testing of different types of satellites. Pakistan Space and Atmosphere Research Commission (Suparco) has prepared the project at a cost of Rs 26.998 billion including Foreign Exchange Component (FEC) of Rs 19.588 billion. The Finances of the project will be managed by a soft loan of $148.24 million from china which will cover 85% of the cost while the remaining 15% will be provided by government of Pakistan. The expected time for completion of the project is 40 months. Rs 1 billion has been allocated for the project in the next financial year 2018-19
It was previously suggested that the space center be built near Kamra to make sharing of resources and capabilities possible between the two facilities. But later it was decided that this facility will be established with a proper commercial outlook completely separate from military dominion. The objective of PSC will be to build satellites for other countries/clients in the future and it might be difficult to bid internationally for commercial work through an entity managed by the military.
Prime Minister approved the project for the establishment of PSC as part of National Space Programme (NSP) 2027 during 27th National Command Authority (NCA) meeting held on December 21, 2017. A detailed satellite development facility having a total covered area of approximately 412,356 sqft has been proposed at Chakri (Rawalpindi District), Punjab to meet the requirement of indigenous development production of various types of satellites. Without this facility, Pakistan will not have any option but to procure a satellite from foreign manufacturers, thus, spending a huge amount of foreign exchange and solely rely on foreign countries. Detailed technical building/facility design will be undertaken by Chinese experts on finalization of the contract
A major portion of the facility will consist of clean room of standard 100,000 class(meaning that thee room will have less than one hundred thousand particles larger than 0.5 microns in each cubic foot of air space) with a small portion of clean room of standard 10,000 class. It will have specialized stores with controlled environment (i.e. temperature, relative humidity and cleanliness) for long term storage of screened components as well as manufactured equipment and also complete satellites
