The first Arab woman in orbit will be Saudi and will live with a compatriot and an Emirati in 2023
The two great economic and military powers of the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia and the Union of Arab Emirates, have come to the conviction that, in addition to their close and fraternal ties of a political, religious, cultural and social nature, they must also strengthen their relations in space.
This is the understanding of the new leaders of both nations. Saudi Arabia's prime minister since 28 September, Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, 37, crown prince to King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who has been on the throne since January 2015 and is about to turn 87. The president of the Union of Arab Emirates since 14 May, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, 61, has also understood this.
The governments of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have relied on their privileged relations with successive US administrations to ensure, with the support of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), that the US space industry has found a way to send astronauts from both nations to the International Space Station (ISS) in parallel.
Through various channels, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has worked to ensure that two Saudi Arabian astronauts will be able to coincide and be on board the ISS together with another Emirati astronaut, and have the opportunity to shake hands in what will be the first meeting in orbit of nationals from two different Arab countries. Barring unforeseen circumstances, it will take place in the spring of 2023.
NASA has confirmed its approval for Axiom Space to launch the private Ax-2 flight to and from the ISS into orbit by 1 May at the earliest. A pair of Saudi Arabian astronauts, a man and a woman, will be on board, meaning that a young woman from the kingdom of the two holy mosques will be the first national of a Muslim country to reach space for a 10-day stay. Turkey's President Recip Erdogan is unlikely to be able to get a Turkish astronaut to snatch political victory from King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud.
Aboard a Dragon capsule launched by a Falcon 9 rocket, four astronauts will travel, among them to conduct experiments, research and other non-profit activities, similar to the Axiom Ax-1 mission (8-25 April 2022) captained by Spanish-American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, now retired from NASA.
The commander of the Ax-2 mission is the veteran American astronaut and biochemist Peggy Whitson, 62, who in three missions has accumulated 665 days in orbit. The pilot is 67-year-old John Shoffner, a millionaire American businessman, airline pilot and champion Formula GT racer.
The utmost secrecy surrounds the two people - and two others in reserve - who since 17 October have been at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the NASA headquarters where astronauts are trained before flying any space mission.
The government in Riyadh, the Saudi Space Commission chaired by the Minister of Information Technology Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha and headed by Mohamed bin Saud al-Tamimi, as well as the director of NASA's Office of Commercial Human Spaceflight, Angela Hart, are keeping a strict silence.
The first Saudi astronaut was Prince Sultan bin Salman al-Saud, a fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force. He was part of the seven-member crew of NASA's Discovery mission, which flew into space 37 years ago on the STS-51-G mission of the space shuttle Discovery, which in June 1985 placed the Arabsat-1B communications satellite into orbit.
One of the Kingdom's neighbours is the United Arab Emirates, which has the largest space programme in the Arab world and is also sending one of its astronauts into space in early 2023. The 41-year-old Sultan al-Neyadi, who has already booked a flight and a seat on the sixth mission of the manned Dragon-6 crew capsule to the ISS, has been chosen.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, the organisation that manages the UAE's space programme, contracted the place last April with Axiom Space, a company licensed by NASA and the US Federal Aviation Administration to organise private manned flights. It will be the second time a Gulf citizen has flown to the orbital station.
Sultan al-Neyadi will be accompanied by two Americans and one Russian, all of whom will spend about six months on the ISS working with the crew. This is a privilege, as it is the first time that an astronaut from a nation not associated with the orbital complex's programme has been authorised to lead a long-duration space mission, which will be representative of the Arab world.
Sultan al-Neyadi holds a degree in electrical engineering from Brighton University in the UK and a PhD in information technology from Griffith University in Australia. In addition, he has been trained and qualified by NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, culminating in early 2022.
One of the first two members of the Emirates Astronaut Corps. Sultan al-Neyadi was Hazza al-Mansouri's backup astronaut, who on 25 September 2019 was sent with two Russian cosmonauts in a Russian Soyuz capsule to the ISS, where he lived for eight days. Al-Mansouri and Al-Neyadi were among 4,000 candidates who applied for the selection process in 2017, and the two were chosen in 2018 to undergo cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Centre near Moscow. There they underwent the basic training that all foreign applicants undergo.