Subscribe free to our newsletters via your
. Space Travel News .




SPACE TRAVEL
'First' Pakistan astronaut wants to make peace in space
by Staff Writers
Islamabad (AFP) Oct 26, 2012


Once you've been to both poles, skydived over Mount Everest and set up your country's first consulate in Monaco, the question is: what next?

For 37-year-old explorer Namira Salim the answer is easy -- become the first Pakistani to go into space.

Her flight with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism project is planned for next year. Although no date has been fixed for the venture's first commercial flight, she is looking forward to fulfilling a lifelong obsession.

"As a child I always believed I would go to space. It's not that I read about it one fine day and thought of signing up. I've always said this was in my DNA," she told AFP by Skype from Dubai.

"I must have been less than five years old and I was crying very hard. My father was trying to pacify me and I was like 'I don't want anything, I just want to go to space. I don't want any toys, nothing, just send me to space.'"

But coming from a country with no major space programme of its own, where millions live in poverty, the journey to the stars was never likely to be straightforward.

Pressured by her father to study, she kept up her passion for space in her spare time, joining astronomy clubs and spending nights gazing at the desert skies after her family moved to the United Arab Emirates in the 1980s.

"I always had this feeling that there was something very spiritual and divine associated with this whole thing," she said of her ambition. "As if something was really pulling me there and calling out to me, and I had to be there and I belonged there."

Chasing your dreams doesn't always come cheap -- Salim paid $200,000 to sign up with Virgin Galactic in 2007, funded with support from her family, who run a heavy construction equipment firm in the UAE. The weightless component of the flight will last for only a few minutes.

The cost is high by any standard -- but a fraction of the $35 million US software pioneer Charles Simonyi paid for his 2007 trip to the International Space Station -- and Salim insists it's about more than just fulfilling the whims of the rich.

-- Investing in peace --

Salim said the money she has paid is an investment in a commercial industry that will one day replace government space agencies and enable researchers, satellites -- and tourists -- to go up at a fraction of the current cost.

And she believes space travel can eventually play a role in world peace.

"We hope one day politicians could be taken up in space, and a space shuttle like this one we've built with Virgin is perfect for that. We could actually have peace summits and have conflict resolution in space."

Her mission was big news in Pakistan at the time of her signing up for the trip, and when it finally does take place, the country's freewheeling and patriotic media is likely to go into overdrive.

She has already made headlines. In 2007 she became the first Pakistani to go to the North Pole, in 2008 the first Pakistani to go to the South pole and later the same year the first South Asian -- not just Pakistani -- to skydive over Mount Everest.

Currently Pakistan's honorary consul in Monaco, Salim has taken her symbolic "Peace Flag" on all her trips and now plans to carry it into space.

In doing so she hopes to help tell a more positive story about her troubled homeland, which is wracked by Islamist and separatist insurgencies, poverty, disease, power shortages and economic stagnation.

"I think that raising a peace flag on behalf of the country, is what we need badly, more than anything," she said.

Training for the flight was done at the National Aerospace Training and Research Centre in the United States, and included a simulation on a centrifuge recreating the pressures and stresses of the journey to and from sub-orbital space.

"I felt the G-forces, which made me feel as if there was a big elephant crushing me down all the way -- I couldn't even move and I was suffocated," she said.

"Then all of a sudden we broke the orbit and I was in space, the simulation profiles completely changed and I felt light as a feather, floating in space. It was a really liberating feeling."

More than 500 people have put down a deposit to clinch a seat on the 60-mile, two-hour ride into space. Branson has said he hopes the service will make its first journey by the end of 2013.

The Federal Aviation Administration has given Virgin permission to start testing its SpaceShipTwo craft in space, but it is still unclear exactly when the first flights with tourists on board will take off.

But when they do, Salim will be there to make history for her country.

"I love my title 'first Pakistani astronaut', it's like being a very special princess of the country. Maybe nicer than being a princess," she said.

Salim, born in Karachi but now living in Monaco, said her family have always been supportive but would rather she was more conventional in her home life.

"I do have a very radical life, not having followed the typical path of being married with children, that is a worry for them, that is a wish. They do hope I'll settle down," she said.

"But I don't have any plans and I don't believe in any plans, I do believe in destiny and that gut feeling that I've always believed in and followed."

.


Related Links
Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News






Comment on this article via your Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail login.

Share this article via these popular social media networks
del.icio.usdel.icio.us DiggDigg RedditReddit GoogleGoogle








SPACE TRAVEL
Space daredevil Baumgartner is 'officially retired'
United Nations (AFP) Oct 23, 2012
Felix Baumgartner, the first man to break the sound barrier in freefall, says he is giving up being a daredevil but now aims to help others in trouble. "I am officially retired from the daredevil business now," the 43-year-old Austrian told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in a meeting Tuesday to discuss his death-defying jump from the edge of space earlier this month. Ban told Baumgartn ... read more


SPACE TRAVEL
SpaceX capsule completes successful first mission

S. Korea sets new window for rocket launch

Pleiades 1B joins its launcher at the Spaceport for Arianespace's Soyuz mission in November

S. Korea readies third bid to join global space club

SPACE TRAVEL
Opportunity Undertakes Survey Drives Of Local Area

Assessing Drop-Off to Mars Rover's Observation Tray

Valles Marineris - the largest canyon in the Solar System

Curiosity Rover Collects Fourth Scoop of Martian Soil

SPACE TRAVEL
Study: Moon basin formed by giant impact

NASA's LADEE Spacecraft Gets Final Science Instrument Installed

Astrium presents results of its study into automatic landing near the Moon's south pole

European mission to search for moon water

SPACE TRAVEL
Keck Observations Bring Weather Of Uranus Into Sharp Focus

At Pluto, Moons and Debris May Be Hazardous to New Horizons Spacecraft During Flyby

Sharpest-ever Ground-based Images of Pluto and Charon: Proves a Powerful Tool for Exoplanet Discoveries

The Kuiper Belt at 20: Paradigm Changes in Our Knowledge of the Solar System

SPACE TRAVEL
New Study Brings a Doubted Exoplanet 'Back from the Dead'

New small satellite will study super-Earths for ESA

Most Planetary Systems are 'Flatter than Pancakes'

Glitch could end NASA planet search

SPACE TRAVEL
ORBITEC's Rocket Engine Soars Above the Mojave Desert

First Space Launch System 'Pathfinder' Hardware Nearing Completion

S. Korea suspends rocket launch

Blue Origin Completes Pad Escape Test

SPACE TRAVEL
China to launch 11 meteorological satellites by 2020

China makes progress in spaceflight research

Patience for Tiangong

China launches civilian technology satellites

SPACE TRAVEL
Whizzing Asteroid Turns Rocket Scientists' Heads

Lost asteroid rediscovered with a little help from ESA

First Evidence of Dynamo Generation in an Asteroid

Asteroid fragments could hint at the origin of the solar system




The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2014 - Space Media Network. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement