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Podcast: Beyond the Headlines
Episode: Hazza Al Mansouri and the UAE’s space ambitions
Description: On the 27th of September 2019, Hazza Al Mansouri became the first Emirati to go to space. He did it from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, from the same spot that Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, started his journey over 58 years ago.
Back then, in the early years of the space race, Cold War rivals The Soviet Union and the United States were in a technological battle to achieve spaceflight capability, in hopes to secure their scientific and symbolic superiority. Yuri Gagarin went into space ten years before the UAE was formed in 1971. Since then 40 more nationalities have left the earth’s atmo...