Meet the first muslim woman to ever go to space

Anousheh Ansari is the first Muslim woman to ever go into space – and the first to do so with her own funds as well.

She is an entrepreneur and computer scientist born in Iran and she had always wanted to go to space for as long as she could remember.

“I was fascinated by the sheer mystery of space, what’s out there, what’s it like, and how I could get there,” she says.

That didn’t look like it was going to ever happen in 1984, five years after the Iranian revolution when her family had to leave the country to seek a better life in the United States where she studied computer science and electrical engineering.

After meeting her husband, Hamid Ansari, they went into the telecommunications business, founding Telecom Technologies in 1993 – the same year Marc Andreessen and his team released Mosaic, the first web browser.

“When we started the company, the principles of a startup were innovation and speed, which is the same now in Silicon Valley,” she says.

The company later went on to develop a method for enabling voice communication over the Internet. In 2001, in the middle of the US dotcom crash, the company merged with IP-based voice infrastructure products company Sonos Networks, in a $750 million deal.

Space was never far from Anousheh’s thoughts however, and in 2006, she got her chance when she was asked to be a backup for private space explorer Daisuke Enomoto on a Soyuz TMA-9 flight to the ISS.

She underwent the necessary six-month training in Russia’s Star City and got her opportunity when Daisuke was medically disqualify – paving the way for Anousheh to go in his place.

She stayed aboard the ISS for eight days, conducting some experiments and also sending the first ever blog post from the International Space Station.

READ: Check out these photos from years of Apollo missions to the moon

“It’s very liberating [going to space],” she says. “You become humbled by the fact that the universe is so big and you’re such a small part of it. At the same time you are empowered by seeing how small everything is because then you’re like, ‘These are the things I’m worried about? They’re nothing.’ It helps you re-prioritize your life, your relationship with the world and the people around you, with your environment, and makes you realize what’s important and what’s not.”

She later went on to co-found her latest company, Prodea Systems, in the same year, and she is currently Chairman and CEO of the company.

Prodea is a platform that allows several different kinds of devices to talk to it, with the purpose of gathering data and providing useful results.