Eutrusca
12-09-2006, 18:21
Commentary: This lady is truly amazing. Raised in Iran, now a US citizen, wealthy entreprenuer, flying into space aboard a Russion spacecraft on the next mission to the International Space Station! Wow!
She Dreamed of the Stars; Now She’ll Almost Touch Them (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/science/space/12tourist.html?th&emc=th)
By WARREN E. LEARY
Published: September 12, 2006
From a balcony in Mashhad, a city between two mountain ranges in northeastern Iran, a young girl looked up at the stars — far away yet close enough to kindle a dream.
“I’d lie there looking and wondering,” she said many years later. “I was so young but so fascinated with space; it’s always been in my heart.”
Now the wonder of the girl is about to become reality for the woman, as Anousheh Ansari prepares to become the first woman to go into space as an amateur astronaut.
On Monday, Mrs. Ansari and two professional astronauts are scheduled to blast off in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, part of a crew-exchange flight to the International Space Station.
The Iranian girl, now an American citizen and a wealthy entrepreneur, is to be the fourth private space explorer to buy a ticket to visit the station. (The price is undisclosed; Space Adventures, the company in Vienna, Va., that arranges the trips, is reported to charge up to $20 million each, most of it going to Russia’s space program.)
The venture into space was both expected and a surprise for Mrs. Ansari. She had been serving as backup to Daisuke Enomoto, a Japanese businessman who trained for months to be the next space tourist. But on Aug. 20, the Russian Space Agency announced that an undisclosed medical condition made him ineligible to go. So it became Mrs. Ansari’s turn.
Dennis Tito, an American businessman, became the first amateur to visit the station in 2001, followed in 2002 by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African entrepreneur, and by the American scientist and businessman Gregory Olsen in 2005. In an interview, Mrs. Ansari, who turns 40 today, said she was sorry that Mr. Enomoto would miss this opportunity; they became friends during training. But she will readily seize this chance to venture into space. “Space has always been part of my heart, and I will go with anyone who will fly me,” she said.
Mrs. Ansari is used to being an exception. She relishes the idea of being a role model for other women who want to do the unexpected.
She came to the United States with her family as a teenager, unable to speak English. She conquered that handicap swiftly, earning a bachelor’s degree in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University. (She is pursuing another master’s, in astronomy, from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.)
After college, she worked at MCI in the engineering division, where she met her husband, Hamid Ansari. In 1993, she persuaded him that they should leave MCI and start their own telecommunications company. That company, Telecom Technologies Inc., grew rapidly, earning several major technology patents; the Ansaris were able to sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars. The family later formed Prodea Systems Inc., a digital technology and investment company, in Plano, Tex., which is sponsoring Mrs. Ansari’s spaceflight.
Mrs. Ansari’s involvement in space is not new. In 2001, she and her brother-in-law, Amir, made a multimillion-dollar donation for naming rights to what became the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award for the first private company to build a rocket capable of two manned suborbital flights in two weeks.
The aircraft designer Burt Rutan won the contest in 2004 with his SpaceShipOne. When Mr. Rutan announced he was joining with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Company to make a larger version for commercial suborbital flights by 2008, Mrs. Ansari was one of the first to reserve a seat.
The Ansari family also signed an agreement this year with Space Adventures for Prodea Systems to be the financing partner in developing another vehicle to take up to five people on suborbital trips. The partnership has contracted with the Russian Space Agency to develop the spacecraft, named Explorer, said Eric Anderson, president of Space Adventures.
“Her interest is long-term, based upon a love of space that is deeply felt,” said George Whitesides, executive director of the National Space Society, an advocacy group. “She represents the potential of women if given the chance, and that includes being a pioneer for private spaceflight.”
Mrs. Ansari said she enjoyed her months of training at Star City in Russia and at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, including the difficult task of adding Russian to the three languages she already speaks, Farsi, French and English. Partly because of this effort, she dislikes being called a “space tourist.”
“A tourist is someone who just buys a ticket and then goes somewhere,” she said. “They don’t train for six months, including survival training in water and on land, and try to learn every system on a spacecraft.”
When asked at a recent news conference in Star City why she wore an American and an Iranian flag on her spacesuit, Mrs. Ansari said she wanted to recognize both countries’ contributions to her life.
“I was born in Iran and lived there until the age of 16 and then moved to the United States,” she said, according to wire service reports. “So I have a lot of roots in Iran and feel very close to the Iranian people and the culture of the country.”
Mrs. Ansari said she had gotten many encouraging messages from around the world, including Iran, particularly from girls and women. “I want to reach women and girls in remote parts of the world where women are not encouraged to go into science and technology jobs,” she said, “They should believe in what they want and pursue it.”
A guiding principle of her life, she said, is a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi: “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
“This is what I am trying to do,” Mrs. Ansari said.
Her last-minute selection means she will not be able to take along some private experiments she wanted to conduct during her eight days on the space station. But she said she would participate in some European Space Agency experiments aboard, take lots of pictures with a digital camera, and perhaps use a ham radio to talk to people around the world.
“I have the coordinates of certain pictures I like taken from space, and I want to see those places in person,” she said. “And I want to see the place where I grew up in Iran, where I first looked up at the stars.”
She Dreamed of the Stars; Now She’ll Almost Touch Them (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/science/space/12tourist.html?th&emc=th)
By WARREN E. LEARY
Published: September 12, 2006
From a balcony in Mashhad, a city between two mountain ranges in northeastern Iran, a young girl looked up at the stars — far away yet close enough to kindle a dream.
“I’d lie there looking and wondering,” she said many years later. “I was so young but so fascinated with space; it’s always been in my heart.”
Now the wonder of the girl is about to become reality for the woman, as Anousheh Ansari prepares to become the first woman to go into space as an amateur astronaut.
On Monday, Mrs. Ansari and two professional astronauts are scheduled to blast off in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, part of a crew-exchange flight to the International Space Station.
The Iranian girl, now an American citizen and a wealthy entrepreneur, is to be the fourth private space explorer to buy a ticket to visit the station. (The price is undisclosed; Space Adventures, the company in Vienna, Va., that arranges the trips, is reported to charge up to $20 million each, most of it going to Russia’s space program.)
The venture into space was both expected and a surprise for Mrs. Ansari. She had been serving as backup to Daisuke Enomoto, a Japanese businessman who trained for months to be the next space tourist. But on Aug. 20, the Russian Space Agency announced that an undisclosed medical condition made him ineligible to go. So it became Mrs. Ansari’s turn.
Dennis Tito, an American businessman, became the first amateur to visit the station in 2001, followed in 2002 by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African entrepreneur, and by the American scientist and businessman Gregory Olsen in 2005. In an interview, Mrs. Ansari, who turns 40 today, said she was sorry that Mr. Enomoto would miss this opportunity; they became friends during training. But she will readily seize this chance to venture into space. “Space has always been part of my heart, and I will go with anyone who will fly me,” she said.
Mrs. Ansari is used to being an exception. She relishes the idea of being a role model for other women who want to do the unexpected.
She came to the United States with her family as a teenager, unable to speak English. She conquered that handicap swiftly, earning a bachelor’s degree in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University. (She is pursuing another master’s, in astronomy, from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.)
After college, she worked at MCI in the engineering division, where she met her husband, Hamid Ansari. In 1993, she persuaded him that they should leave MCI and start their own telecommunications company. That company, Telecom Technologies Inc., grew rapidly, earning several major technology patents; the Ansaris were able to sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars. The family later formed Prodea Systems Inc., a digital technology and investment company, in Plano, Tex., which is sponsoring Mrs. Ansari’s spaceflight.
Mrs. Ansari’s involvement in space is not new. In 2001, she and her brother-in-law, Amir, made a multimillion-dollar donation for naming rights to what became the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award for the first private company to build a rocket capable of two manned suborbital flights in two weeks.
The aircraft designer Burt Rutan won the contest in 2004 with his SpaceShipOne. When Mr. Rutan announced he was joining with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Company to make a larger version for commercial suborbital flights by 2008, Mrs. Ansari was one of the first to reserve a seat.
The Ansari family also signed an agreement this year with Space Adventures for Prodea Systems to be the financing partner in developing another vehicle to take up to five people on suborbital trips. The partnership has contracted with the Russian Space Agency to develop the spacecraft, named Explorer, said Eric Anderson, president of Space Adventures.
“Her interest is long-term, based upon a love of space that is deeply felt,” said George Whitesides, executive director of the National Space Society, an advocacy group. “She represents the potential of women if given the chance, and that includes being a pioneer for private spaceflight.”
Mrs. Ansari said she enjoyed her months of training at Star City in Russia and at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, including the difficult task of adding Russian to the three languages she already speaks, Farsi, French and English. Partly because of this effort, she dislikes being called a “space tourist.”
“A tourist is someone who just buys a ticket and then goes somewhere,” she said. “They don’t train for six months, including survival training in water and on land, and try to learn every system on a spacecraft.”
When asked at a recent news conference in Star City why she wore an American and an Iranian flag on her spacesuit, Mrs. Ansari said she wanted to recognize both countries’ contributions to her life.
“I was born in Iran and lived there until the age of 16 and then moved to the United States,” she said, according to wire service reports. “So I have a lot of roots in Iran and feel very close to the Iranian people and the culture of the country.”
Mrs. Ansari said she had gotten many encouraging messages from around the world, including Iran, particularly from girls and women. “I want to reach women and girls in remote parts of the world where women are not encouraged to go into science and technology jobs,” she said, “They should believe in what they want and pursue it.”
A guiding principle of her life, she said, is a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi: “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
“This is what I am trying to do,” Mrs. Ansari said.
Her last-minute selection means she will not be able to take along some private experiments she wanted to conduct during her eight days on the space station. But she said she would participate in some European Space Agency experiments aboard, take lots of pictures with a digital camera, and perhaps use a ham radio to talk to people around the world.
“I have the coordinates of certain pictures I like taken from space, and I want to see those places in person,” she said. “And I want to see the place where I grew up in Iran, where I first looked up at the stars.”