SAUDI Arabia sent astronauts to space for the first time in decades.
On Sunday, the 21st of May, a private rocket carrying Saudi astronauts Rayyanah Barnawi and her colleague Ali Al-Qarni, a fighter pilot, blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in the Southern United States while on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Barnawi was the first female Arab astronaut to make it to space, an achievement that she said gave her great pleasure and honor.
Both astronauts are sponsored by the Saudi government, with the ticket reportedly priced at $55 million each.
The team also includes Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who will be making her fourth flight to the ISS, and American businessman John Shoffner from Tennessee.
The group will stay in the ISS for 10 days and carry out 14 experiments focused on “human research, cell sciences, and cloud seeding experiments in the microgravity environment.”
Barnawi and Al-Qarni were the first batch of Saudi astronauts to be deployed to space in 35 years.
In June 1985, then-28-year-old Prince Sultan Bin Salman traveled on board the space shuttle Discovery, making him the first Muslim, the first Arab, and the first member of a Royal family to fly into space.
The Middle East has been making innovations in the sector of the global space industry since Saudi Arabia made history by sending the Arab world’s first astronaut to space.
