Anousheh Ansari

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Anousheh Ansari
Anousheh Ansari
Country: United States
Organization: Private
selected on March 2006
Calls: 1 space flight
Begin: September 18, 2006
Landing: September 29, 2006
Time in space: 10d 21h 06min
EVA inserts: No
retired on September 2006
Space flights

Anousheh Ansari ( listen ? / I PersianAudio file / audio sample انوشه انصاری[ ænuːˈʃɛ ænsɔːˈriː ]; * September 12, 1966 in Mashhad , Iran ) is an American -Iranian multimillionaire and the first female space tourist .

Life

Ansari was born as Anousheh Rassiyan in Iran and spent childhood and youth there. In 1982 she emigrated to the USA because at the time she was unable to study science in her homeland - Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979 - as the universities were closed for two years. The parents allowed the now naturalized Ansari to move to her aunt in Virginia on the east coast of the USA. At George Mason University in Fairfax (Virginia) she studied electrical engineering and computer science (graduating in 1989 as a Bachelor ). She continued her studies at George Washington University (GWU) in the US capital and received a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1992 .

During her studies at GWU, Ansari worked for the US telecommunications company MCI Worldcom in Washington, where she met the Iranian engineer Hamid Ansari and married in 1991. The couple left MCI two years later.

Ansari in the Zvezda Service Module (ISS)

Anousheh, Hamid and his brother Amir Ansari then settled in Plano in Texas north of Dallas . In 1993, in the small town of Richardson , between Dallas and Plano, the three founded the Internet company tti (telecom technologies incorporated). Hamid became President, Anousheh became Chief Executive Officer and Amir became Chief Technology Officer. In 2000, the US company Sonus Networks took over tti for 550 million US dollars and Anousheh briefly managed the Sonus subsidiary IntelligentIP.

With the money from Sonus Networks, the three Ansaris founded a private equity firm called Prodea Systems .

On the 43rd anniversary of Alan Shepard's suborbital flight into space , Prodea made a donation to the X-Prize Foundation . Anousheh and her brother-in-law Amir announced on May 5, 2004 that they had supported the foundation with several million US dollars. The X-Prize was then renamed the Ansari X-Prize in honor of the donors.

In March 2006 it was announced that Anousheh Ansari would fly as a space tourist on a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) . In April 2006 she began to train as a replacement for the Japanese Daisuke Enomoto , who was originally supposed to start in September 2006 with Soyuz TMA-9 . Only a month earlier, Enomoto had surprisingly been removed from the crew for health reasons and Ansari had been appointed as a member of the crew that started on September 18, 2006 for the ISS. It reached the ISS on September 20 at 7:21 am CEST. She returned to Earth on September 29 with Soyuz TMA-8 and ISS Expedition 13 .

Web links

Commons : Anousheh Ansari  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ tagesschau.de (Horst Kläuser): First female space tourist in space - women fly differently , September 18, 2006
  2. ↑ tagesschau.de: First female space tourist reaches space station ISS ( Memento from July 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) , September 20, 2006
personal data
SURNAME Ansari, Anousheh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-Iranian entrepreneur and the first female space tourist
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Mashhad , Iran