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Anousheh Ansari had the best excuse for ditching an astronomy lesson.
“I’m sorry, I can’t finish this class,” she told her teacher. “I’m going to space.”
It was 2006, and a spot had opened up on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station. A bout of chronic kidney stones had ruled out a Japanese candidate for the mission. Ansari was next in line.
She leapt at the chance and became the first self-funded woman to go to space. But it’s what she did next that greased the wheels for commercial space travel and laid the groundwork for future space tourism.
Ansari was awarded an honorary doctorate in science this week in recognition for her impact on space exploration and research by Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, where she studied astronomy online.
Ansari witnessed the Islamic revolution growing up in Tehran. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini took over and the regime closed her school, derailing her ambitions of becoming an astrophysicist or astronaut. “The new Iran did not tolerate such dreams from a woman,” she has said.
Her family moved to Washington DC in 1984, when Ansari studied electrical engineering and computer science. She went on to launch a telecommunications company with her husband.
Their work earned them millions. As her 40th birthday approached, Ansari booked her US$20 million ticket to space.
Working with Space Adventures, a company which offered private space trips via the Russian space program, Ansari underwent six months of cosmonaut training before blasting off in September 2006. Her 11-day expedition to the ISS transformed her.
“You’re outside where all your world is – family, your friends, your school, your home, your memories. And you’re looking at it from up there – it’s like an out-of-body experience,” Ansari said after receiving her doctorate on Thursday.
“All the little things disappear and you only see big things. You see landscapes, you don’t see borders, you don’t see dividers. That is the message I took back with me.”
After battling a bout of the vomit-inducing sickness inflicted by microgravity, Ansari participated in experiments on back pain and anaemia, and took swabs from her body to test how bacteria would grow in space.
Re-entry was the scariest moment. The Soyuz capsule was tiny and hot. Hitting the atmosphere and feeling the parachutes deploy was like going over the Niagara Falls in a wheelbarrow, Ansari recalled, borrowing another astronaut’s phrase.
The capsule crashed back hard on land because Russia didn’t have access to an open-water landing like Artemis II. But Ansari had made it home. Her trip had a profound impact on what she did next.
“I realised we spend normally 80 per cent of our times on little minute things – what I call ‘noise of life’ – and only maybe 20 per cent on big-picture important things,” she said.
“I decided to flip that ratio, and focus 80 per cent of my time and attention on big important things in my life, and only 20 per cent on the noise.”
Ansari left her business and became chief executive of the XPRIZE Foundation, a non-profit which runs lucrative competitions aimed at driving technological innovation. The first competition, the Ansari XPRIZE, offered $US10 million to the first non-government organisation to build a reusable crewed spacecraft.
Burt Rutan won with SpaceShipOne, his experimental spaceplane. The flurry of activity sparked by the prize is credited with kick-starting the US$469 billion commercial space sector, which leads to regular launches from companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin.
About 700 people have gone to space; that number is likely to skyrocket given renewed interest driven by Artemis II and a commercial industry Ansari partly helped launch.
Visiting space soon may become akin to the Mount Everest climb, Ansari says – a testing ground for adventurers who can afford it, with the added gift of proving Earth’s preciousness to all who travel beyond our atmosphere.
“I’m not saying everyone should go to space,” Ansari said. “But those who have the desire to, they should have the opportunity to experience it. Because as I explained, it has transformed me.”
“I spend all of my time now with XPRIZE figuring out the problems that are preventing us from having an equitable and abundant world. I’m a Star Trek fan, so I want to build the Star Trek world for us – without the Klingons, of course.”
In a recent chapter of the XPRIZE, teams from four countries competed for $3.5 million over the past week at the NSW Rural Fire Service headquarters, testing new ways of rapidly detecting bushfires from space.
Asked about the conflict ravaging her home country, Ansari says: “We have a big hump right now that we need to overcome to get to that beautiful future I’m hoping for.”
But her memories of space – and the new Earth-rise image captured by the Artemis II crew – gives her hope peace is possible.
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Angus Dalton is the science reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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