The Middle East's Mission To Mars

As space gets cheaper and more accessible, new countries are drawing our gaze to the heavens—and away from their controversies on Earth

- John Beck

On the afternoon of Sept. 25 last year, Hazza Al Mansouri walked a gantlet of camera phone-wielding wellwishers at Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. In a step to his left were Russian commander Oleg Skripochka, a veteran on his third mission, and American flight engineer Jessica Meir, a first-timer like Mansouri. Their white-and-blue Sokol spacesuits made them appear hunched and ungainly, the communication caps covering all but a patch of the face— in Mansouri’s case, dark eyes, a close-cropped beard, and most of a prominent forehead. Ahead of the astronauts were 160 vertical feet of a Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft and the elevator that would take them to its very tip.

Mansouri waved to his wife and three children. They’d said goodbyes earlier that day through the glass of the quarantine complex where astronauts spend two weeks before launch. Not being able to hug had been difficult, given the risks of what Mansouri was about to do. The previous October, a booster for another Soyuz craft, MS-10, had failed a few minutes after liftoff, forcing the crew to eject and parachute back to Earth in a shower of debris.

The MS-15 crew had observed the same superstitious traditions as all the others who’d taken off from Baikonur since the early 1970s: planting saplings on the avenue of trees, autographing their bedroom doors, watching the Soviet action film White Sun of the Desert. As Mansouri walked, he realized he and his crewmates looked just like the astronauts in photos he’d pored over as a child, except this time one of their suits—his—had the United Arab Emirates flag on its arm.