Emirati astronaut Nora AlMatrooshi has dreamed of travelling to the Moon and has spent a large portion of her life staring up at the stars, just like her ancestors did. She graduated from NASA’s training programme this week, making history as the first Arab woman prepared to take off into space.
AlMatrooshi, 30, recalls an elementary school science lesson in which her teacher acted out a lunar landing, complete with homemade spacesuits and a makeshift rocket ship tent.
“She had turned off the lights in our classroom when we emerged from the tent. AlMatrooshi told AFP, “She was telling us that we were on the surface of the Moon, and she had everything covered in grey cloth.”
“I found a resonance with that day, and it has stayed with me. And I recall thinking, “This is incredible.” I genuinely want to visit the Moon’s surface and I want to do this for real. And that’s when it all began,” she recalled, wearing a blue flight suit with her name and the flag of the United Arab Emirates embroidered on it.
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 programme.
Currently, AlMatrooshi, her fellow Emirati, Mohammad AlMulla, and ten other members of their training class are fully qualified astronauts following two years of arduous work, which included practice 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.
Plans to construct the airlock, a specialised doorway, for Gateway, the space station under development that will eventually circle the Moon, were revealed earlier this year by the UAESA.
“My goal is to advance humanity to unprecedented heights. AlMatrooshi declared, “I want humanity to travel farther than the Moon and back to the Moon.”
“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.
AlMatrooshi, a Muslim woman who covers her hair with a hijab, described how NASA came up with a plan that lets her wear her hair covered while donning the agency’s trademark white space suit and helmet, which are formally referred to as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU.
“Once you get into the EMU you put on a (communications) cap (fitted with microphones and speakers), which… covers your hair,” she explained.
The difficulty arises just after AlMatrooshi removes her traditional headscarf but before she puts on the communications hat. The fact that only items with special authorization may be worn inside the EMU only serves to complicate things more.
In the end, the suit engineers sewed me a temporary hijab so I could put it on, put on the suit, put on the communication cap, and take it off to cover my hair. Thus, AlMatrooshi remarked, “I really, really appreciate them doing that for me.”
AlMatrooshi will be prepared to launch into space with her fellow astronauts thanks to her personalised suit.
NASA’s Artemis 3 mission is scheduled to bring people back to the Moon in 2026.
“I think becoming an astronaut is hard, regardless of what your religion or what your background is,” she stated to AFP.
It wasn’t harder, in my opinion, because I’m Muslim. However, I became aware of the contributions made by my forebears—Muslim scholars and scientists who studied the stars before me—when I became a Muslim.
“Me becoming an astronaut is just building on that legacy of what they started thousands and thousands of years ago,” said AlMatrooshi.
