No burkas for this girl, she prefers a spacesuit.
Posted on 08/24/2006 9:57:19 PM PDT by anymouse
A young Iranian-born American woman who rallied her wealthy family to underwrite a $10m (£5.3m) competition for the first private spaceflight will soon get to experience for herself the thrill of being a space tourist.
On Tuesday, Anousheh Ansari was confirmed as the replacement for Japanese businessman Daisuke Enomoto as a fare-paying passenger onboard the next Russian rocket mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
Lift-off for the Soyuz capsule that will carry Mrs Ansari and two members of the next ISS crew is scheduled for 14 September from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.
In her quest to fly in space, Mrs Ansari, co-founder of Texas-based Telecom Technologies, helped seed the development of a private spaceflight industry by donating $10m for the X-Prize competition, which was awarded in 2004 for the first pair of suborbital manned flights.
The winning vehicle, called SpaceShipOne, was built by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
A commercial version of the ship is under development by Rutan's Mojave, California-based firm in partnership with Sir Richard Branson's newly created Virgin Galactic spaceflight enterprise.
The company has sold about 200 tickets for flights, which are scheduled to begin in 2008 from the Mojave Desert. Mrs Ansari holds a reservation.
She also spearheaded a new family venture called Prodea to develop a line of air-launched suborbital vehicles in partnership with Virginia-based Space Adventures, as well as spaceports in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore to launch them.
More recently, she jumped at the chance to train as a reserve for Mr Enomoto in the hope of clinching the grand prize of spaceflight: a 10-day trip to the space station.
"Anyway you can fly me, I'll go," she said in an interview last month in Houston.
In the end, her wait may be far shorter than expected. Mr Enomoto, 35, was stripped of flight privileges earlier this week for undisclosed medical reasons.
It was not immediately known if he would remain eligible to fly on a future mission.
If he is, Mr Enomoto may be just as happy to wait. Russia recently added a $15m (£7.9m) option to its basic $20m (£10.6m) fare - a 90-minute spacewalk outside the ISS.
As for Mrs Ansari, she will have to fly without the projects she wanted to do in space and she may end up having to eat the meals ordered by Mr Enomoto.
Hopefully, though, she will be able to bring along some of her own clothes.
The Japanese businessman - a young-at-heart science-fiction fan - had sent ahead his spacesuit: an outfit modelled after cartoon pilot hero Char Aznable from the Gundam animation series.
No burkas for this girl, she prefers a spacesuit.
Space tourism ping.
She's a Persian beauty.
Yeah, I think her crewmates will be okay with the substitution.
Indeed.....
they better profile and search her.
> No burkas for this girl, she prefers a spacesuit.
Space chicks are to be prefered, of course.
> She's a Persian beauty.
Ind3eed so. And my hope is that a *lot* of coverage for this manages to get into Iran. The propaganda value of a *free* Persian woman floating among the stars is probably incalculable. Anything to help the Iranian people to overthrow their whackadoodle government.
As a consequence... I really hope launch security is on the ball. I'm sure the Iranian ecret police are also aware that Iran's rulers will not benefit from this flight, but might benefit from the Soyuz going *FOOM* on the pad.
It's about time this thread showed up. The old one from March wasn't getting any hits. She is American.
Waiting for the STS-115 Atlantis live countdown LIVE THREAD. Blastoff is scheduled for Sunday, six years after the original schedule. The thread ought to be starting any time.
Must be something wrong with the title of the thread.
That is why we will win. Not easily, and maybe not soon, but we will.
In World War II, we defeated the Axis with the scientists it drove out (Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Fermi, Bohr, and more others than I can name). During the Cold War, we took the lead because the best of the Germans (most notably von Braun) would rather come here than go the USSR.
And now the first Persian woman in space will be an American. An American by choice -- someone who freely chose our ideals and embraced our freedoms. We've got to broadcast that into Iran, to all the people there who are chafing under the mullahs. Fire up Radio liberty and rock it the f out.
Tell every Iranian woman that this could be her daughter. You live in a country with abundant natural resources and a long tradition of enlightenment and education. That tradition has been hijacked by a mediaeval caste for about 27 years. You, and your daughters, deserve better.
Your tradition is yours, not Khomeni's. You own it. You are not slaves. Your men are not slaves to the Arabs and neither are you. Take your country back, Persian men and women together, and we will help.
When we say it, we have to mean it. Another unmet promise would be disastrous.
Right. I have said it too after hearing it from Robert Zubrin. He said that sending men to Mars could be what it takes to defeat this terrorism. It is an indirect effect, but lasting.
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