Pakistan Recycles Old Satellite Image As New, Gets Caught- Again: A Pattern That Never Gets Old

When SUPARCO, Pakistan's space agency, launched the EO-3 Earth observation satellite aboard a Chinese Long March 6 rocket from the Taiyuan launch centre on April 25, there was genuine reason for celebration. The third and final satellite in Pakistan's PRSC-EO constellation, EO-3 completed a functioning Earth observation architecture that two predecessors had already begun building — a meaningful step forward for a programme long criticised for underdelivering on its promise.

But within days of the launch, what caught the attention of independent analysts was a photograph. Shared widely on Pakistani social media and amplified by official-adjacent accounts, the image was presented as EO-3's first shot of Karachi Port. The claim was dramatic, the timing convenient, and the patriotic fervour it stirred was immediate.

It took those analysts only hours to deflate it. A closer look at SUPARCO's own website revealed the same image had been uploaded months earlier in 2025 — well before the April launch. The photograph could not possibly be EO-3's first view of anything. It was old. It had been repurposed and repackaged as new, circulated without correction, and allowed to build a false narrative around a real but modest achievement.

This is, by now, a distinctly Pakistani story. Not the satellite. Not even the exaggeration. What is specifically Pakistani is the pattern — the recycling of old imagery, the doctoring of footage, and the institutional willingness to let false claims travel unchecked as long as they serve a momentary propaganda need.

The most damning recent example came during Operation Sindoor, when Indian air strikes in May 2025 targeted terror infrastructure across the border. In the hours and days that followed, Pakistani officials and media figures circulated a torrent of images and video clips claiming to show Indian airbases destroyed, air defence systems knocked out, and missile storage facilities in flames. The imagery spread quickly, amplified by state-adjacent social media accounts and picked up by some international outlets before verification could catch up.

It did not take long. India's Press Information Bureau issued point-by-point refutations, debunking viral claims including fake videos, fabricated images, and false government advisories. Western open-source intelligence analysts worked methodically through the footage. What they found was a catalogue of fabrications. Video clips had been sourced from entirely unrelated conflicts, some years old — one widely shared clip purportedly showing a Pakistani Air Force attack was traced to an army simulation video game, confirmed as such by PIB Fact Check.

The embarrassment was profound, but it was not unprecedented. Pakistan's relationship with self-defeating information operations goes back decades and is particularly acute in the space domain, where aspirations have historically outrun accomplishments.

Consider Paksat-1. Around 2002–2003, President Pervez Musharraf publicly boasted that Pakistan's space programme was ahead of India's, citing the satellite as proof of indigenous capability.

What he did not mention was that Paksat-1 was a second-hand satellite. Originally designed for Indonesia by Hughes, it suffered a battery problem that rendered it partially inoperable, and was subsequently sold to Pakistan for around five million dollars and renamed Paksat-1.

It was, in fact, a third-hand satellite — originally bought by Indonesia, later sold to Turkey, and then hurriedly purchased by Pakistan to occupy its only remaining slot in space. The achievement was real only in the sense that the satellite functioned. The claim of indigenous development was not.

Then there is the matter of orbital slots. The ITU allotted five geostationary slots to Pakistan in 1984. Pakistan failed to launch any satellites until 1995, was granted an extension, failed again to meet the deadline, and ultimately lost four of those five positions. The one slot Pakistan managed to retain — 38°E — was saved only by the last-minute acquisition of Paksat-1. Once lost, geostationary slots are almost impossible to recover.

Badr-B, launched in December 2001 and promoted as a major leap forward for Earth observation, had a more ambiguous fate than is often claimed. Its design life was two years, and the mission lasted approximately two years — meaning it performed broadly as specified, before being decommissioned a decade later.

The real failure was institutional rather than technical: years of delays, funding shortfalls, and political interference had kept the satellite in storage for most of the 1990s before it ever reached orbit, squandering the window of opportunity it was meant to exploit.

What unites these episodes is not incompetence alone. Incompetence can be found in any space programme, including mature ones. What distinguishes the Pakistani pattern is the institutional culture of overclaiming — of insisting on achievements that did not happen, circulating images that are not what they are said to be, and retreating into silence rather than transparency when the facts emerge.

EO-3 is a real satellite. It is in orbit. It carries genuine capability, and two siblings are already delivering data.

That is worth acknowledging. But the recycled Karachi Port image is also real — real in what it reveals about a deeper pathology. A space programme, or a government, confident in its actual accomplishments does not need to manufacture them. The fact that someone felt the need to present an old photograph as a historic first image says more than any launch announcement could.

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