Sep 18 2006
Ansari in Space
Here’s a great piece on Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space tourist to the International Space Station. (Her blog of the trip is here.)
The details surrounding the trip and the validity of space tourism are worth discussing, but the real interesting side to this is her background. She and her family emigrated from Iran following the Islamic revolution and she went on to earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She and her husband founded a telecommunications company that they later sold for half a billion dollars.
Here’s a no-brainer for you - where would she be now if she had stayed in Iran? Something tells me she wouldn’t be flying in space right now and there would be no Ansari X Prize.
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Fox News) An Iranian-American telecommunications entrepreneur took off Monday on a Russian rocket bound for the international space station, achieving her dream of becoming the the world’s first paying female space tourist. Anousheh Ansari was accompanied by a U.S.-Russian crew on the Soyuz TMA-9 capsule, which entered orbit about 10 minutes after liftoff from the Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Ansari reportedly paid $20 million to become the fourth private astronaut to take a trip on a Russian spacecraft and visit the station. On Sunday, Ansari defended the role of “space flight participants” and said she viewed herself as an ambassador for attracting private investment to space flight. “In order to make great leaps in space exploration … private companies and the government need to work together,” she said at a news conference at the cosmodrome in Baikonur.
Ansari gave $10 million in 2002 for the naming rights to a prize awarded to the first successful privately financed manned trip into space. [The Ansari X Prize won by Burt Rutan and company.]
Ansari follows in the footsteps of Britain’s Helen Sharman, who flew to Russia’s Mir Space Station in 1991 as a tourist as part of a lottery system called Project Juno.
Ansari said she expected seeing Earth from space would alter her view of the planet. “You’ll see how small and how fragile the Earth is compared to the rest of the universe,” she said. “It will give us a better sense of responsibility.”
Earlier she said she was eager to see Iran from space — she hasn’t been back since emigrating to the United States — and hopes to inspire girls in her homeland to study science. Ansari and her family left Iran a few years after the Islamic revolution, in part because the opportunities for a young girl to study science were becoming limited there. Speaking no English when she arrived as a teenager with her family in Virginia, she went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering within a few years.
She and her husband married in 1991 and later moved to Texas to start a company that made signal-switching software for phone networks. In 2000, at the height of the telecommunications boom, they sold their suburban Dallas company to Massachusetts-based Sonus Networks Inc. for $550 million in Sonus stock.
