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Saudi Arabia First Woman To the Moon: Meet Rayyanah Barnawi

Saudi Arabia walks on the moon with it’s gender equal space mission on May 9th

by Majid Al-Husseini

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Saudi Arabia Shocks The World By Sending First Women Astronaut To The Moon

This month will see the launch of Saudi Arabia‘s first female astronaut, the latest effort by the country to shed its notoriously conservative reputation.

As part of a mission by the private space company Axiom Space, Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Al-Qarni will travel to the ISS in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

The Space Mission

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Ax-2 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida’s Launch Complex 39A. In April 2022, Axiom Space launched its first mission with four private astronauts to the ISS, where they spent 17 days in orbit.

The United Arab Emirates, a neighbor of Saudi Arabia, became the first Arab nation to send a citizen into space in 2019. Hazzaa al-Mansoori, an astronaut, stayed on the ISS for eight days. In February of this year, Sultan al-Neyadi, another fellow Emirati, will travel to the space station. Neyadi, also known as the “Sultan of Space,” will launch for the International Space Station (ISS) atop a Falcon 9 rocket and become the first Arab astronaut to spend six months in space.

Notably, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been pushing for reforms in an effort to shed the country’s reputation for austerity. Saudi women have been able to drive and travel abroad unaccompanied under his rule since 2017. In addition, the percentage of women in the workforce has more than doubled since 2016, from 17% to 37%.

Saudi Space Ambitions

However, this is not Saudi Arabia‘s first venture into space. In 1985, the United States dispatched air force pilot and country royal Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz to the oil-rich nation. It went to space as the first Arab Muslim nation. The nation established a space program in the following years, and as part of Prince Mohammed’s Vision 2030 plan for economic diversification, it launched another program to send astronauts into space last year.

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