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At a time when space exploration has become a competition between world powers, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) plans to send an unmanned probe to Mars by 2021, which will be the Arab world's first mission to another planet.
A new UAE Space Agency will be created to coordinate the UAE's growing space technology sector and to supervise the mission. The mission will be led by Emiratis and will expand the nation's human capital through knowledge transfer from international partners, as well as increasing human knowledge about space exploration and distant planets.
"The UAE Mars probe represents the Islamic world's entry into the era of space exploration. We will prove that we are capable of delivering new scientific contributions to humanity," UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan said in a statement Wednesday.
Do you think this is likely? I do not know of any country which was able to launch such missions in only 7 years.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by prospectacle on Thursday July 17 2014, @02:10PM
Whether they succeed or not, I applaud every effort of a government (or anyone, really) to reach some space-exploration milestone.
These are some of the hardest engineering and logistics problems around, and the techniques and technologies that come out of their attempts will often spawn whole new industries.
In that regard it's kind of like war, but in this case they try to avoid killing people most of the time.
Some people say "let's feed everyone in the world first". I agree, but since they're not going to do that, and we can't make them, let's at acknowledge that among the things governments are willing to do, space-races are good for the species.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic