Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/DUBAI: United Arab Emirates Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre has announced that the first long-duration Arab astronaut mission was scheduled to launch on February 26.
According to Arab News, SpaceX Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon nine rocket could carry UAE astronaut and mission specialist Sultan Al-Neyadi, along with two the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA astronauts mission commander Stephen Bowen and pilot Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and Warren Hoburg.
Astronaut Mission
Emirates News Agency reported on Thursday that crucial mission information, such as the launch time and launch opportunities, was announced during the NASA Crew-6 mission overview media briefing.
Salem Humaid Al-Marri, MBRSC Director-General, said, “we are proud to talk about our second mission under the United Arab Emirates Astronaut Programme and Sultan’s first mission to space.”
Humaid said, “our human space programme kicked off in 2017 when we selected our first two astronauts, Sultan Al-Neyadi and Hazzaa Al-Mansoori. We had our first mission to ISS in 2019, which impacted hundreds of people.”
He said that Al-Neyadi is a very capable astronaut, and he, along with his colleague Al-Mansoori, has five years of training, including training on EVAs and operations aboard ISS.
“We have over 20 science experiments from UAE universities in the upcoming mission and many outreach activities being done across the Arab region.”
Al-Neyadi said that the idea of waking up every morning and having access to a window like the Cupola, where one can scan the entire globe in 90 minutes, was terrific, and he believed it was literally our world.
