The Minister of Education of the Middle Eastern country Ahmed Belhul al-Falasi stressed that the launch of the Emirati space program "would not have happened without close cooperation with Russia"
SHARJAH /UAE/, May 31. /tass/. Russia became one of the first countries that helped the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to implement its own space program. This was announced on Wednesday by the Minister of Education of the Middle Eastern country Ahmed Belhul al-Falasi, speaking at the opening of the III Conference of Rectors of Russian and Arab Universities in the Emirati city of Sharjah.
"We recently announced a new research mission in space. Here I would like to note that Russia was one of the first partners of the UAE that helped us in the implementation of the space program," he said. "Astronauts Hazaa al-Mansouri and Sultan al-Neyadi were trained in Russia before the first flights," the minister explained. According to him, the launch of the Emirati space program "would not have happened without close cooperation with Russia."
The UAE started space exploration in 2006, when Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the country's prime minister and ruler of Dubai, founded the Emirati Institute of Advanced Science and Technology. Nine years later, the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center was established on its basis.
In 2020, the UAE sent the Al-Amal interplanetary station to Mars. The purpose of this mission is to study the atmosphere and climatic conditions of the Red Planet, as well as the change of times of the Martian year, which lasts almost twice as long as the Earth.
In 2020, the UAE also announced the launch of a national lunar exploration program. On December 11, 2022, the Japanese Hakuto-R lander was launched from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome (Florida, USA) using the Falcon 9 launch vehicle of the American company SpaceX. He was supposed to deliver the Emirati planetoid Rashid to the surface of the Earth's natural satellite. On April 25 of this year, Takeshi Hakamada, the head of the Ispace module developer company, said that communication with Hakuto-R was lost during the moon landing, the mission was declared unsuccessful.
