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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17 2014, @02:46PM
I think you underestimate the scale of resources that a consortium of oil-rich countries can apply. I suspect you also underestimate the difficulties created by bureaucratic mandates that each of the 50 states must manufacture at least one part of any space vehicle and how differently things work in a true kingdom. Think, instead, about how quickly SpaceShipOne got into space, and that was just a couple of billionaires' pet project.
A lot of the Middle East is aware that oil won't last forever. Some of them are working hard at developing industries and technology that will maintain their prosperity when the oil does run out. If a couple of them figure that "Space" is going to be the thing, then I think they could give Russia some serious competition in the space race. The US seems pretty much to have dropped out of that race, at least at a national scale, and I'd like to see a real race start up again.
(Score: 1) by subs on Thursday July 17 2014, @06:06PM
If you think SpaceShipOne or any of Virgin Galactic's efforts is comparable to the difficulty of getting an orbit-capable launch vehicle, you have no clue of the scale of the problem. Getting into space is easy and that's all Virgin Galactic is doing - a brief hop above 100km in altitude so that people can enjoy weightlessness for a few minutes. But getting into orbit is much more difficult. On Earth, to get into space all you need is about 1.5km/s of delta-V. To get into orbit it takes about 9km/s. And due to the exponential nature of the rocket equation, this means that you need a launch vehicle that is about 13x heavier to get into orbit than to just do a short suborbital space flight.
To illustrate, take a highly efficiently run private development program that actually did result in an orbit-capable rocket: SpaceX's Falcon 1. It took 6 years from start of the company until the first successful launch. And they already had plenty of rocket engineering talent to hire from (lots of their key people were formerly aerospace engineers at places like Lockheed and Boeing) AND their rocket was extremely rudimentary (pressure-fed upper stage with about 500kg (claimed) LEO capability, which means capability to Mars: essentially zero kg). Going beyond LEO requires still more effort - deep space communications, maneuvering, spacecraft hibernation, precise heat management, developing radiation hardening, etc.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Friday July 18 2014, @11:19PM
While all your points are valid, we might be underestimating the fear of being thrown into UAE's prisons, or other "motivations."
(Score: 1) by subs on Saturday July 19 2014, @12:40PM
Iron Man 1 wasn't a documentary.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday July 20 2014, @12:21AM
Perhaps it was "inspired" by some aspects?