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UAE Plans to Send First Arab Spaceship to Mars by 2021

posted by janrinok on Thursday July 17 2014, @01:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-luck-with-that-voyage dept.

AnonTechie writes:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Spook brat on Thursday July 17 2014, @02:31PM

    by Spook brat (775) on Thursday July 17 2014, @02:31PM (#70270) Journal

    Of course, an argument could be made that NASA's efforts to put a man on the moon were largely pointless, because they never followed it up with anything long-term. No moonbases, no asteroid mining, the US just kind of got bored and wandered off, leaving the technology and know-how to rot. I can imagine the UAE doing something similar.

    I guess it was worth it just to prove that it can be done, if nothing else.

    What putting a man on the moon proved was that we could place a payload wherever we wanted in the Human sphere of influence. The conclusion I draw from lack of further interest/funding is that once the Cold-War point of "imagine that this was a bomb" had been made for Russia to see, the actual mission was accomplished.

    EF's heavily-downmodded joke about the Arab space race was actually on topic. Honestly, if the North Koreans put an honest effort into manned orbital spaceflight they'd be worrying us a whole lot more than they are with their ineffective missile launches. Military analysts will be watching news of this closely to see if we need to start caring about ICBMs being launched out of the Persian Gulf.

    --
    Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday July 17 2014, @03:38PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday July 17 2014, @03:38PM (#70301)

    You don't need to get to the moon to prove that. Just have John Glenn kick a nuke out the door during one of his 3 orbits and you can save the next 7 years' worth of effort and money.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17 2014, @07:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17 2014, @07:01PM (#70411)
    His post wasn't on topic, he was just begging for attention. If my dog barks while we're talking about sand paper, we don't commend him for pointing out that it's 'ruff'.