A 22-year-old Pakistani's road map to space by 2050

The five fields that will hold the jobs of the next twenty-five years

Muzamil opens the episode with a question he had been putting to ChatGPT: which fields will hold the most jobs twenty-five years from now? The answer came back as a list of five, and it sets the frame for the entire conversation.

Number one was space exploration. Number two was biotechnology — “an intersection of medicine and technology” that Muzamil expects to push average lifespans to 120 or 130, with Japanese researchers already regrowing teeth and full hearing restoration moving from theory to clinic. Number three was energy, because AI needs it and because we are about to start producing water artificially at scale. Number four — the most interesting one, Muzamil says — was climate economics: a world where “the entire economics of the world starts becoming carbon-driven,” and where Pakistani exporters like Interloop are already chasing carbon neutrality to win tax credits in Europe. Number five was robotics, filling the productivity hole left by a shrinking working-age population in the West.

Space sits on top of that list, and it is the one most Pakistanis tune out. “In Pakistan, more often than not, we get disconnected from these things because until they go mainstream, we don’t take them seriously.” That is the gap this episode is trying to close.

Meet Hassan Mossin, 22, Pakistani passport, headed for orbit

Muzamil introduces his guest as one of the first Pakistanis with a credible shot at actually going to space. Hassan Mossin is 22. He studied astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He trains with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, the IIAS, in Florida. And, importantly for Muzamil’s audience, he holds only a Pakistani passport — no Canadian citizenship, no permanent residency, no second passport waiting in a drawer.

Muzamil presses on this point directly: “Are you an ABCD born and bred in Canada, or are you inherently a Pakistani with a Pakistani passport gone from Pakistan? Because there’s a big difference.” Hassan was born in Pakistan, spent his early years there, did high school in Saudi Arabia, and only landed in Canada for university.

His path into space, he says, started in a small house in Rawalpindi. “I remember looking at pictures and videos of the Apollo missions, and I wanted to go to space. But being this five-year-old kid who’s in a tiny house in Rawalpindi, I didn’t think it was possible. You have to be American to go with NASA. You have to be Russian. Those are the only two ways.” So he picked the next closest thing — study space from the ground.

The IIAS application nearly broke him. Page one asked about lidar, robotics, remote sensing, atmospheric physics. Page two asked for a scuba diving license, a pilot license, a skydiving license, and an aviation medical. “I had none of the above. I closed the application and went to sleep.” A few days later he decided he would spend the summer getting all of them. He did.

From Apollo one-offs to a sustainable infrastructure

Muzamil’s question to Hassan is whether the moon is the new America — a frontier Columbus heads for, plants a flag on, and exploits. The answer is more sober. The Apollo missions were one-offs. “Everything is gonna be just we’re gonna take everything, the food, the water, everything we’re gonna go, and we’re gonna just have that one mission instead of developing the proper infrastructure.”

The new space age is different in two ways. First, it is commercial — Blue Origin, SpaceX, Vast, Axiom, Voyager Technologies. Hassan calls them “the billionaires’ playground,” and grants that this is where Katy Perry-style joyrides come from. But the capitalist competition is what drives prices down. Second, NASA itself has shifted strategy: “NASA basically decided that now they’re gonna out-contract almost everything.”

The International Space Station is being deorbited by 2030 because it is old and expensive to maintain. Replacing it are at least three private stations targeting 2027 or 2028. Virgin Galactic’s new Delta spaceplane is supposed to start flying by the end of this year, with a rhythm of two flights a week and six people on each. That is twelve civilians a week. “I don’t think everybody realizes how quickly access to space is going to open up.”

The question, Hassan says, has changed shape. “It’s not, do you want to go to space? It’s, what do you want to do when you get there?”

Payload specialist is the new astronaut

The answer for most people who go up in the next five years will be “payload specialist.” You design a science experiment. You pitch a company. “Hey, I want you to give me a million dollars to go to space. I’m gonna go to space, do this experiment, and the research data is gonna be so important.” You bring the data back. That is the new sponsorship model, and Hassan thinks it is going to be “rampant” within five years.

By 2032, the next layer kicks in: NASA’s Artemis program targets a semi-permanent lunar base. After that, Mars — which, Hassan points out, is actually a better long-term inhabitation target than the moon because of its atmosphere. The asteroid belt mining that Muzamil’s ChatGPT-generated road map predicted? Hassan tempers it. “I think they are realistic. We definitely have the capability. But now it’s the economic viewpoint.” Orbital mining will take decades. A Martian base could be inside twenty years.

The jobs nobody is naming yet

Muzamil pushes Hassan on the interdisciplinary question: once the novelty fades, what jobs actually exist up there?

The list Hassan gives is deliberately unexpected. Geologists, because studying lunar and Martian geology teaches us about Earth’s tectonics. Chemists, because both bodies have confirmed water. Doctors. Space architects — “a very, very new field that nobody’s thought about before” — because someone has to design the habitats. Material scientists who can sew, because Prada is helping NASA build the next generation of spacesuits for Artemis.

Muzamil pulls out the larger pattern. “It’s the intersectionality or interdisciplinary nature that’s going to be very, very powerful. It’s about knowing biology, or knowing architecture, but also having an understanding of material science. Architecture increasingly became a very design-oriented art or humanities-driven field. Now it’s architecture with a lot of science. It’s fashion design, but a lot of science.”

The traditional educational routes still hold. You still go to med school. You still study geology. You just bolt physical training onto the end — scuba, especially, because neutral buoyancy underwater is the closest simulation of space weightlessness humans have figured out.

Who owns the moon

Muzamil’s wife had asked him a question that turns out to be the policy question: if we mine the moon, do we eventually lose it? Hassan’s first answer is practical — the moon is big. His second answer is more interesting: the real value of lunar resources is not in bringing them back to Earth. It is in what the space community calls in-situ resource utilization, ISRU. Giant 3D printers that turn lunar dust into wrenches and screwdrivers and emergency tools on site, so the base does not have to depend on Earth for every broken part.

Then comes the law. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 — “probably the most important document in all of space policy” — says no country can own a celestial body. The more recent Artemis Accords clarified the part the OST left open: you can own the resources you extract, but you cannot own the moon itself. You can temporarily claim a crater for a five-month study window. You cannot plant a flag and call it yours.

There is also a liability regime baked in. “If a NASA astronaut accidentally crash-lands in Russia, Russia legally has to help that astronaut get back to America and keep him safe.” If China destroys another country’s satellite, accidentally or on purpose, it pays. “We’re just trying to mitigate space war.”

The energy bottleneck and the data center question

When the conversation turns to near-Earth orbit, Muzamil lays out the commercial stack as he sees it: communications (Starlink and its competitors), navigation (GPS, China’s Beidou), data centers, energy, and warfare. He asks Hassan which of these is real in the next five to seven years.

Hassan’s answer surprises. The bottleneck for a lunar base is not food, not oxygen, not pressurized habitats — “we already built spacecraft… they’re basically a spacecraft that are in the shape of human body.” It is energy. The moon gets 14.5 days of direct sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness, with brutal temperature swings. Solar alone cannot carry that cycle. NASA’s stated plan is to set up nuclear fission reactors on the lunar surface.

Orbital data centers solve two problems on Earth — electricity demand and water for cooling. But they create a harder one. “In space, you wouldn’t use water. All the heat that you have… has to be thrown outwards using radiation. And it’s very, very inefficient.” The real bottleneck for AI in orbit is thermal management.

And then the warfare layer underneath all of it. The Outer Space Treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in orbit. It says nothing about guns. “Russia actually fired a cannon in space secretly. In 1975, they attached it to the outside of their space station and just shot it and didn’t tell anybody. We only found out much later.” The US Space Force exists. Most of what it does is classified. Targeted lasers from orbit are not, Hassan reluctantly admits, ruled out by current policy.

The Pakistani path in, starting now

Muzamil wants the episode to land somewhere actionable for the audience he keeps in mind — Pakistani teenagers and their parents. He notes that Pakistani Air Force pilots have been selected to train with China’s Tiangong program, and that one is scheduled to fly as a payload specialist. The fifth-largest country in the world, with the fourth-largest expert community in the US and decent relations with both Washington and Beijing, is not as far from this story as it thinks.

Hassan’s advice is specific. Pakistan recently became the sixth country to send a satellite to the moon — the iCube Qamar. SUPARCO runs the rockets and atmospheric satellites. But the country is behind on what he calls “indigenous capability of students.” In Canadian universities he sees 17-year-olds building advanced satellites in student rocketry teams. The path in: read the NASA systems engineering textbook, build a CubeSat (a 10-centimeter cube satellite), contribute to NASA citizen science projects from a laptop, find a rocketry team — NUST has a good one — or build one if your campus does not. “It’s time for the students to get the capabilities rather than only the top professionals.”

Muzamil adds the local map. The Tukwa space observatory in Bella, Balochistan, run by enthusiasts tied to the Institute of Space Technology in Islamabad. Pakistan’s 2040 space vision, drafted in 2011, with a lunar mission slated for 2035. SUPARCO doing the unsexy, slow work in the background. “More often than not, sometimes things are happening in Pakistan. It’s just that the right people are smart enough to cut through the cracks.”

The parent’s caveat, and the close

There is a moment near the end where Muzamil interrupts himself to address his own son, who might watch this in 2045. “Rafael, if you’re watching, you’re an artist, I’m still proud of you. I’m just trying to map out the possibilities of whether you can actually go to space. I don’t want to be that Pakistani parent — space, astronaut, artist.” It is a small line, but it carries the whole brand of the show: map the possibilities, do not weaponize them.

Muzamil closes by telling Hassan something he says he rarely says to 22-year-olds. “I’ve had over 550 conversations over the last five years. I’ve bugged people a lot — people at the age of 40, 50, and I get into their industry. At just 22, I’m incredibly proud of the fact that you are a Pakistani. You have the flag on your hand. You represent the country. The amount of knowledge that you display, the amount of passion that you display, it is an incredible honor to be having this conversation with you. Inshallah, I shall see you on the moon someday.”

Hassan’s reply is short. “Inshallah, I will go to the moon someday. That’s the plan.”