UAE heads for space | Global finance magazine

The successful entry into orbit around Mars in February of an interplanetary spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signaled the return of a long marginalized region to the forefront of science.

“There are two sides to the mission,” says Farouk El-Baz, a former lunar geologist with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), who sits on the mission’s high-level International Science Advisory Board. “The first is to uplift the spirit of the UAE and the Arab world, to say, ‘We can do it.’ The other is to supplement the scientific information of the big boys. “

The “big guys” would be the United States and China, which were already up there. Now the Arab world wants a piece of the action. “Arab civilization once contributed to science,” says Marwa Maziad, a non-resident researcher in the defense and security program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, who sees this latest scientific success as a return to form that will produce business benefits.

At 50 years old this year, the UAE built its economy on oil; although it began to diversify earlier and more aggressively than its Gulf neighbors. “The UAE has led the Arab world to new frontiers in deep space for the first time in history,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE vice president and prime minister and emir, said in a statement. from Dubai. “Our space mission carries a message of hope and confidence in Arab youth.”

He didn’t use the word hope by chance. With a capital “H”, it is the name of the spacecraft (Al-Amal in Arabic), chosen from thousands of suggestions received during a national campaign.

The public face of the space program has been a young woman, Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, born in 1987, Minister of State for Advanced Technology, who launched it in 2015 with a request on Twitter for people to suggest her name. She is president of the United Arab Emirates Space Agency and the United Arab Emirates Council of Scientists, as well as Minister of Advanced Technologies.

The mission is to write “a different narrative and interpretation for a predominantly Arab country and what it presents to the world,” says Maziad. “The UAE emphasizes STEM fields, not just oil, not just old failures. The “new branding”, as she puts it, is based on international cooperation contrary to old stereotypes of “supporting extremism”.

The United Arab Emirates’ Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center worked with the University of Colorado, Boulder; Arizona State University; and the University of California, Berkeley, to design and build the spacecraft. It was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan and powered by a Japanese rocket. Scientific data from the flight will be shared with more than 200 institutions around the world and will focus on the Martian atmosphere. “Mars is losing its atmosphere,” says El-Baz. “How? ‘Or’ What?”

The flight makes the United Arab Emirates the second country to successfully enter orbit around Mars on the first try (the other was India). The $ 200 million expedition will last for one Martian year, just under two Earth years. While the mission only took six years to unfold, the UAE’s interest in space exploration dates back at least to the 1970s, when El-Baz first visited as a member of the famous American team Apollo.

In the past twelve years, the country has launched 10 satellites. A year and a half ago, he sent an astronaut to the International Space Station. Now the UAE is offering to subsidize an Arab satellite, according to El-Baz. “Hope was the seed to encourage the Arab world to think big,” he said.

The mission is designed in particular to “send a message to the Arab world and its youth,” says Maziad, “that any individual can be a part of it.”