Rayyanah Barwani, a breast cancer researcher, is the first woman from Saudi to engage in a space expedition along with Ali Al-Qarni, a Saudi Arabian fighter pilot. This mission is called as SpaceX Axiom Mission 2 which took off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida to the International Space Station on Sunday.
Their team’s mission commander is an ex-NASA Astronaut, Peggy Whitson, who will make her fourth visit to the ISS and is also accompanied by John Shroffner, an American racer, investor and a pilot.
Background of the mission:
While this is not Saudi’s first venture into the space given the Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz’s participation in the US-organized space voyage of 1985, it is certainly a first for a Saudi woman to voyage into space.
They will be joining an existing group of seven individuals who are already on board the International Space Station (ISS). This group consists of three Russians, three Americans, and Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, who recently became the first Arab national to participate in a spacewalk.
In April 2022, Axiom Space successfully completed its inaugural private astronaut mission to the ISS. The mission, known as Ax-1, involved the participation of three businessmen and former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria for a total of 17 days.
Goals of the mission:
The team is set to conduct around 20 experiments at the ISS. Broadly, these experiments are compartmentalized into four areas of research, i.e. Life science, human research, physical science, STEAM and technology demonstration. Here, the term STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics.
About Rayyanah Barwani:
Rayyanah obtained a Bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences from the University of Otago and pursued a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences at Alfaisal University, focusing on the adhesion of breast cancer stem cells Barnawi has dedicated over nine years of her career as a research lab technician, specifically within the Stem Cell and Tissue Re-engineering Program at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Being an avid outdoor and sports enthusiast, she has participated in scuba diving in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, hang gliding, ledge swinging, river in New Zealand, to hiking and rafting in Türkiye, and much more. In 2014, she participated in wingsuit flying training in Dubai. In 2022, she participated in centrifuge and hypoxic training in Saudi Arabia.
In addition to another achievement in the field of space exploration, the joy of Saudi with its first woman at the helm of the project is truly heartening.
