SpaceX sends Saudi Arabia’s first astronauts to space station, including a woman

Breast cancer researcher Rayyana Barnawi is the first Saudi woman to travel in space. She was joined by fellow Saudi Ali al-Qarni, a fighter pilot.

“Being the first Saudi female astronaut to represent the region, it is a great pleasure and honor that I am very happy,” Barnawi said at a recent press conference.

She said that in addition to her excitement for the research to be done on board, she was looking forward to sharing her experiences with the children on the ISS.

The mission is not Saudi Arabia’s first foray into space.

In 1985, Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, an Air Force pilot, participated in a space flight organized by the US.

But the space mission involving a Saudi woman is just the latest move by the oil-rich Gulf kingdom.

In the team of four astronauts, the other two included Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut, and John Schoffner, a Tennessee businessman, who is serving as a pilot. Whitson is the most experienced astronaut of the four, making this her fourth flight to the ISS.

The private mission was organized by Axiom Space. Astronauts rocketed towards the ISS in a chartered multimillion-dollar flight in the US.

The crew of Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, in the southern US state of Florida.

The crew is scheduled to spend about 10 days on the ISS.

experiments

The four-member team is set to conduct around 20 experiments on the ISS.

One of them involves studying the behavior of stem cells in zero gravity.

They will join seven others already on the ISS: three Russians, three Americans and Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, who last month became the first Arab civilian on a spacewalk.

The mission to the ISS is the second in partnership with ISS keyholder NASA by Axiom Space, a private space company that offers rare visits for sums running into the millions of dollars.