Dubai: The UAE has ambitious plans to grow its space industry, with the country’s investments in space technologies already exceeding Dh20 billion. But a number of challenges remain.
Khalifa Al Romaithi, chairman of the UAE Space Agency, said that obstacles faced by the space industry include not having enough local expertise and manufacturing capabilities.
“We already have some engineers, but they are not sufficient in number. Space was not an important segment in the education system [until recently],” he told Gulf News in an interview at the Dubai Airshow on Wednesday.
“But we will inject space components in the education system and then send them to local and international universities. We have to educate and train people,” he said.
Earlier this year, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed by Al Yah Satellite Communications Company (Yahsat), the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and Orbital ATK Inc to launch a graduate degree programme in Advanced Space Science for the first time in the Middle East.
The UAE also plans to open the first space research centre in the Middle East in 2016.
Meanwhile, the country “doesn’t have full capacity to manufacture and launch satellites”, Al Romaithi said. The UAE has previously sent four satellites into space and plans to launch another one, Khalifa sat, in 2018.
“We are working with international partners in order to transfer technology,” he added.
The UAE Space Agency is supervising one of the country’s most ambitious projects, the Emirates Mars mission to send an unmanned probe to the red planet by 2021.
Al Romaithi said that the Mars Mission is “on track” for 2021. “We are on progress. So far it is working well,” he said.
He declined to give the investment figure for the mission, but said the project will be funded mostly by the agency and the rest by the government.
He expects the agency to announce the launch site of the Mars mission next year. He said that the site will likely be in Europe, Japan or the United States, where the agency is in talks with authorities.
The mission aims to analyse the Martian climate in order for the scientists to better understand the red planet, the Earth, and other planets that have yet to be discovered.
The probe will be a compact spacecraft the size and weight of a small car. It will blast off in a launcher rocket, then detach and accelerate into space. It will reach a speed of 126,000 kilometres per hour for the 600 million km journey around the sun to Mars, which will take around 200 days.
The probe will orbit the red planet until at least 2023, but that can be extended until 2025. It will send back more than 1000 gigabytes of data to be analysed by researchers in the UAE, and shared with more than 200 institutions worldwide.
The 60 million-kilometre journey makes the UAE the ninth country to join the ‘global Martian club’ with the likes of the US, Russia, China, Japan, India and France pursuing Mars mission plans.
The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) is working with the UAE Space Agency on the Mars mission.
“The MBRSC is tasked with developing the Mars mission by the federal government in execution of the entire mission, from defining the mission in the initial phases to launching and operating it and then decommissioning it. We are also tasked with developing the science of the mission,” said Sarah Amiri, EMM Deputy Project Manager, Science Lead at MBRSC.
She expects the UAE to be “a fully functioning space fairing nation” in the next five years with its own civilian satellite programme.
The agency is working on introducing a policy to regulate the space sector and a UAE space law, Al Romaithi said, adding that it will “raise these to the government by January [2016]”.