Saudi woman makes history with space flight
The second-ever private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), organised by Axiom Space, blasted off from Florida on Sunday, carrying the first two Saudi astronauts to travel to the orbiting laboratory. Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, is the first Saudi woman to voyage into space and is joined on the mission by fellow Saudi Ali Al-Qarni, a fighter pilot. The Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) crew took off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in the southern US state of Florida. The team also includes Peggy Whitson, a former Nasa astronaut who will be making her fourth flight to the ISS, and John Shoffner, a businessman from Tennessee who is serving as pilot. "Thanks for putting your trust in the Falcon 9 team," SpaceX chief enginer Bill Gerstenmaier told the crew minutes after lift-off. "Hope you enjoyed the ride to space. Have a great trip on Dragon," he added, referring to the spacecraft. "Welcome home to zero-g, Peggy." The crew is due to spend around 10 days on board the ISS, where they should arrive on Monday morning, US time. "Being the first Saudi woman astronaut, representing the region, it's a great pleasure and honour that I'm very happy to carry," said Barnawi at a recent press conference. The mission is not Saudi Arabia's first foray into space. In 1985, Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, an air force pilot, took part in a US-organised space voyage. But the space mission involving a Saudi woman is the latest move by the oil-rich Gulf kingdom, where women only gained the right to drive a few years ago, to revamp its ultraconservative image. The kingdom established the Saudi Space Commission in 2018 and launched a program last year to send astronauts into space. (AFP)