“It’s going to be really exciting, really interesting” to have three Arabs in space at once, he said last week. Both were in space for about a week.Īl-Neyadi will be joined this spring by two Saudi astronauts going to the space station on a short private SpaceX flight paid by their government.
He was followed two years later by Syrian astronaut Muhammed Faris, launched by Russia. Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman was the first Arab in space, launching aboard shuttle Discovery in 1985. Two new UAE astronauts are training with NASA’s latest astronaut picks in Houston. The Emirates already have a spacecraft orbiting Mars, and a mini rover is hitching a ride to the moon on a Japanese lander. “We don’t want to just go to space and then not have much to do there or not have impact,” said the director general of the UAE’s space center in Dubai, Salem al-Marri. The UAE’s minister for public education and advanced technology, Sarah al-Amiri, said the long mission “provides us a new venue for science and scientific discovery for the country.” The oil-rich federation paid for al-Neyadi’s seat on the SpaceX flight. He served as backup for the first Emirati astronaut, Hazzaa al-Mansoori, who rode a Russian rocket to the space station in 2019 for a weeklong visit. A replacement Soyuz arrived last weekend.Īl-Neyadi, a communications engineer, thanked everyone in Arabic and then English once reaching orbit. The other station residents are two Russians and an American whose six-month stay was doubled, until September, after their Soyuz capsule sprang a leak. The space station newcomers will replace a U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew that has been up there since October.
“We added a bright new star to that night sky tonight,” she told reporters.
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