THE RACE FOR SPACE

With the UAE recently sending the Arab region’s first astronaut to the ISS, is it ready to cross the final frontier and boldly go where no man has gone before?

- GEORGIA TOLLEY

It felt like half the country was holding its breath. The delicate parachute floated down against a dusty blue sky, holding the lives of three astronauts in its taut strings. Hazza Al Mansoori returning to Earth, after eight days and approximately 128 orbits of the globe. The Emirati fighter pilot is the UAE’s first astronaut, and the first Arab to set foot on the International Space Station.

His landing on the Kazakh steppes was perfect. The former fighter pilot emerged from the Soyuz spacecraft grinning broadly. As his crew covered him with an Emirati flag, he gave the thumbs-up sign to the cameras.

Only one short year ago, Al Mansoori and his back-up Sultan Al Neyadi were just military men. Then Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai announced the start of the astronaut programme on Twitter.

More than 4,000 men and women applied, and eventually father-of-four Al Mansoori was picked along with Al Neyadi as a back-up. They immediately started an intensive training programme at Star City in Russia, rebuffing any suggestions of space tourism. “Normally astronauts train for five years,” Al Neyadi explains, “But this was accelerated. It has been really tough.” “It was hard to digest,” adds Al Mansoori. “The Soyuz spacecraft is all in Russian. All the buttons… the first time I sat down…it is like alien letters. [I asked myself] how can I learn all of this?”