The United Arab Emirates already has a site aboard SpaceX ‘s Dragon capsule , which will send an astronaut from that country on the ‘Crew-6’ mission.
The United Arab Emirates announced on Friday that it was sending an astronaut into space for a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) , “a new stage” in the space ambitions of the wealthy Gulf country.
This “new stage” has been crossed “with the signing of a new agreement to send the first Arab astronaut on a long 180-day mission to the ISS,” the vice president of the Emirates and leader of Dubai, Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashed al Makum, tweeted. .
According to the Emirati newspaper The National, the agreement was signed on Wednesday between the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) and Axiom Space, at the Emirates embassy in Washington.
The astronaut will be part of the SpaceX Crew-6 mission , which is scheduled to launch in 2023, according to this source.
The Emirates, which has seven emirates, including those of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, sent the first Emirati into space in September 2019 on an eight-day mission aboard a Soyuz rocket that took off from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
In July of the same year, this oil-rich country launched, from the Japanese Tanegashima space center, an unmanned spacecraft with the “Hope” probe to be placed in Mars orbit, as part of the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. . AFP.