Emirati astronaut Nora AlMatrooshi has dreamed of traveling to the Moon and has spent a large portion of her childhood staring up at the stars, much like her predecessors did.
She graduated from NASA’s training program this week, making history as the first Arab woman prepared to take out into space.
AlMatrooshi, 30, recalls an elementary school science session in which her teacher acted out a lunar landing, replete with homemade spacesuits and a makeshift rocket ship tent.
“We got out of the tent, and we saw that she had turned off the lights in our classroom. She had everything covered in gray cloth, and she was telling us that we were on the surface of the Moon,” AlMatrooshi told AFP.
“That day resonated with me, and it stuck with me. And I remember thinking, ‘This is amazing. I actually want to do this for real, I want to actually get to the surface of the Moon.’ And that’s when it all started,” she recalled, dressed in a blue flight suit embroidered with her name and the UAE flag.
AlMatrooshi, an oil industry veteran and mechanical engineer by training, was one of two astronaut candidates selected by the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) in 2021 to begin a NASA training program.
Currently, AlMatrooshi, her colleague Emirati, Mohammad AlMulla, and ten other members of their training class are fully trained astronauts following two years of arduous labor, which included practicing spacewalks.
The band, dubbed “The Flies,” is now qualified for NASA trips to the International Space Station (ISS), Artemis lunar landings, and, with luck, NASA flights to Mars.
The UAESA announced earlier this year plans to build the airlock a specialized doorway for Gateway, the space station in development to someday orbit the Moon.
“I want to push humanity further than it’s ever been before. I want humanity to go back to the Moon, and I want humanity to go further beyond the Moon,” AlMatrooshi said.
“And I want to be part of that journey.”
As the first Arab woman to graduate from NASA, AlMatrooshi is not the only one to have experience in private space missions. Rayyanah Barnawi, a Saudi biomedical researcher, flew with Axiom Space to the International Space Station last year, and Sara Sabry, an Egyptian-Lebanese engineer, was part of the crew on a Blue Origin suborbital flight in 2022.
