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Sarah Al Amiri was in COVID-19 quarantine after arriving in Japan in July 2020 when she learned news beyond anything she had ever dreamed of: while scrolling through Twitter to pass the time, she learned that the government of the United Arab Emirates was reshuffling some of its higher ranking offices and officers and that Amiri, now 35, was being appointed chairwoman of the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA)—the equivalent of NASA Administrator.
Amiri was already a member of the U.A.E. Prime Minister’s office, serving as Minister of State for Science—she was in Japan for the launch of her country’s first Mars mission, aboard a Japanese Mitsubishi rocket. Yet she says the news still stunned her. “I was shocked. I think that is the right word,” she recalls.
Shocked at the honor and the responsibility that came with it, perhaps, but she could not have been entirely surprised. Amiri has been fascinated with space since she was 12 years old, when she first saw a picture of the Andromeda galaxy and learned that it is 2.5 million light years from Earth—an almost unfathomable distance. However, given that space exploration was still in the hands of just a few of the world’s largest nations, it seemed unlikely to a young Amiri that a country like the U.A.E. would reach space any time soon. So rather than anything directly space-related, Amiri studied computer programming in college. But by the time she graduated in 2009, the first green shoots of an Emirati space program had begun to sprout. She applied to join UAESA and was hired at 22 as a 22-year-old software engineer, working on an advanced aerial systems program.
The U.A.E. launched its first Earth observation satellite, Dubai SAT, in 2009, followed by Dubai SAT 2 in 2013. Then, in 2014, it set its space ambitions far higher, announcing a goal to send a probe to Martian orbit by 2021—the country’s 50th anniversary. That gave…
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Source : time
