Exceptional accomplishment of the United Arab Emirates obtained a spaceship on Mars.

 

In  2020 the UAE's space agency launched its first Mars mission,  The spaceship was called "Hope". It was not American, or Russian, or from the European Union. Hope was the first spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) to travel further than an orbit around the Earth. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft from an Arab nation to reach Mars, and the UAE would become only the fifth nation in the world to successfully put a spaceship in orbit around Mars.

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) lies at the far end of Dubai International Airport, about half an hour's drive east of the Burj Khalifa. By space centre standards it is relatively compact; you could probably lose it in the car park of Nasa's giant Johnson Space Centre in Houston. 

In February 2022, Omran Sharaf was leading the Emirates Mars Mission. Sharaf, 38, says the inspiration for the mission was the "triple helix model, in which you have the private sector, the government and academics… to have that overlap happening. And not having each sector working as silos."

With this, the UAE had staked its claim at becoming one of the 21st Century's leading space agencies. In the Cold War, such developments would have seemed far-fetched. But space exploration in the 2020s is a very different beast. The space race dominated by the geopolitical rivalry of the US and the Soviet Union has fragmented, and now involves many more players – both commercial entities like America's SpaceX, and upstart agencies from relatively small countries like the UAE. 

"The UAE had no time to wait and needed to expedite and speed up the building of these capacities. So it looked at Mars to do that," Sharaf says. The deadline was for the mission to achieve Mars orbit before the country celebrated its golden jubilee in October 2021. 

Hope's mission is a proud moment for a young nation, but national pride carries little weight with the global scientific community. What will cement the mission's legacy in the decades to come is the science.