Rock on which Zayed founded space industry
As the UAE prepares for the Arab World’s first interplanetary venture, James Langton explains how the spark for the mission was ignited almost 50 years ago by a gift to Sheikh Zayed
A tiny piece of Moon rock, a gift from Richard Nixon in 1972, sits in a display case in Al Ain Museum. It is a symbol of hope – and indeed Hope, the UAE spacecraft scheduled to blast off in 2020 and head for Mars.
The country’s extraterrestrial ambitions would never have come near fruition without the vision of Sheikh Zayed, the Founding Father, who held a series of meeting about going into space not long after that gift was received from Nixon. Four decades on it is thanks to Sheikh Zayed’s vision that the UAE stands on the brink of joining the space race.
Space exploration has never seemed closer or more exciting. The UAE is planning its 2021 Emirates Mars Mission and on Monday, the winner of our Genes in Space competition, Alia Al Mansoori, will watch from Cape Canaveral as her experiment is launched to the International Space Station on a giant SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. To mark this historic moment, our three-part series looks at what is a new space race, one in which governments and private industry, including some of the biggest names in business, compete not just against each other, but to advance our knowledge of outer space.
For the UAE, the dreams of space began when the country was young. In a display case at the Al Ain Museum is a fragment of rock, a gift from US president Richard Nixon “as a symbol of the unity of human endeavour”.
It is a tiny piece of Moon rock, gathered when the country was not yet a year old and carried back to Earth by the crew of Apollo 17 in September 1972. That was the final Apollo mission, and the astronauts Eugene Cernan and Ronald Evans were the last men to set foot on the Moon.
This was the symbolic start to the UAE’s relationship with space, one that will become reality when in three years, the spacecraft Al Amal or Hope arrives to orbit the planet Mars. The arrival is timed to coincide with the country’s 50th anniversary.
Hope is due to blast off from Earth in 2020, taking advantage of a narrow launch window that aligns Earth and Mars when their orbits are closest, and will take a year to arrive.
The journey behind the county’s first interplanetary scientific mission, though, has been five decades in the making.
In the 1970s, Sheikh Zayed, the Founding Father, held at least three meetings about space, including a memorable gathering in Abu Dhabi in February 1976 with three American astronauts who had taken part in the historic link-up in orbit with a Soviet Soyuz craft a year previously.
Sheikh Zayed was presented with a model of the US space shuttle, then still five years away from its first flight, arranged by American-Egyptian Nasa scientist Dr Farouk El Baz.
Nearly 40 years later, Dr El Baz was congratulating the country’s current Rulers by video link in May 2015, at the official launch of the UAE Space Agency.
The agency’s director general, Dr Mohammed Al Ahbabi, regards the picture of Sheikh Zayed and the three American astronauts as a powerful tool.
“The UAE space programme has its roots in the time of Sheikh Zayed,” Dr Al Ahbabi says. “We use this image to reflect that our space programme is not something that has just happened. There have been preparations.”
The agency has just marked its third anniversary. Dr Al Ahbabi says the support and commitment of the country’s leaders have been crucial in engaging with young people.
Space, he believes, has a much bigger role to play than just an industrial sector.
“We use space as a tool to inspire. When we bring astronauts to students we see their big eyes and we say, ‘well if you want to be an astronaut you have to do well in maths and science’. It’s another tool. It doesn’t matter where they go later – maybe they will go to oil and gas, or to aviation or the nuclear sector, or other hightech sectors.”
The agency was formed after the success of YahSat, the Mubadala company whose satellites serve the military, the Government and the private sector.
The company plans to this year launch Al Yah 3, a communications satellite, offering broadband services across almost all of Brazil and 60 per cent of Africa.
At the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai, a team of UAE scientists is working on KhalifaSat, an Earth observatory satellite, the launch of which is expected next year.
The satellite will provide high-resolution images that can be used for functions including urban planning, mapping environmental change and aiding rescuers in natural disasters.
Two other satellites have been launched by the MBR Space Centre. The first was built by Korean scientists in Korea with the participation of Emirati technicians.
For DubaiSat-2, the Koreans and Emiratis worked together to design and build the satellite in Dubai. KhalifaSat, the most technologically advanced of the three, is wholly designed and built by Emiratis. This is an ideal model, says Dr Ahbabi, of how the UAE can acquire skills and technology.
Developing a skilled and diversified workforce is a primary role of the agency, as is inspiring young people with projects such as the Genes in Space competition, supported by The National. The winner of the contest, Alia Al Mansoori, 15, will have her experiment sent to the International Space Station for testing in orbit, hopefully today.
“We need to use space as a bridge to the future,” Dr Al Ahbabi says.
“We need space to contribute to our soft power and we need space to inspire young people. This is the big mandate given to us by leadership.”
We need space to contribute to our soft power and we need space to inspire young people
As part of its work, the UAE Space Agency has set up six research centres at universities and institutes across the country, including Masdar, which now offers a qualification in space systems and technology.
It also has plans for students to build 10 “cubesats”, miniature space satellites measuring a few centimetres across that can be used for scientific research.
Above all, what has really seized the imagination of the country is the Emirates Mars Mission, a joint project between the two space centres.
Designed and built by Emiratis, the Hope spacecraft will orbit Mars and scan the surface and atmosphere with a variety of instruments. But its significance is as much symbolic as scientific. This is the first interplanetary mission by an Islamic country.
Dr Ahbabi says missions such as this can remind the world of the UAE’s achievements, but that space can also lift expectations across the Arab World during what is a testing time for many of its youth. It sends a message to the youth of the region: ‘It is possible. Don’t give up. Don’t lose hope. We will help you. Don’t do bad things. Do good things’.”
Space “sends a message to our people that if you want to go there you have to help me to get there. You have to be prepared, you have to sacrifice you have to be apart from your family for months. You have to study hard. You have to work day and night”.
Dr Al Ahbabi recalls an older man who came to see him with his young son. “He said ‘I want my son to be the first one to go to Mars’. We had to explain to him that no one is going there now, that this [Hope] is a spacecraft, a robot.
“And he said, ‘Even if you don’t send someone now, my son has to be the first one there’. So we said bring him and we will educate him.
“When he finishes high school we will provide him with the best education and then he will be ready to go to the Moon or the stars – or even to the oil sector.”
The point is that investing in space can help the entire economy. Of the 500 or so space technicians in the UAE, half are Emirati. Of these, one in three is female. The percentage of women in Nasa is 13 per cent.
Dr Ahbabi would like to see the first Emirati astronaut. He believes the cost would be far outweighed by the positive for the country, on national pride.
“You see the impact on other countries for their astronauts.”
And then there is Mars 2117. The project, unveiled in February, proposes to build a UAE city on Mars. For many, the idea and the timescale is difficult to conceive.
“It’s the longest space project on Earth,” Dr Al Ahbabi says. “But it’s the journey. It’s not the destination.”