Iranian Influential Women: Anousheh Ansari (1966-Present)

Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian American telecommunications engineer and highly successful entrepreneur, was the first female private space explorer and the first Iranian to go to space.

Ansari, born in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad in 1966, moved to Tehran while she was still a child. She and her family left the country a few years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when she was 16, and settled in Texas. She says she has been fascinated with space since her childhood: “Space and space exploration has been something that I have been doing since I was young. It started with a fascination – just watching the stars at night and wondering what is out there in the Universe and if there are other people living out there. It was a fascination with the mystery of space. That is something that has stayed with me through my childhood and my adulthood.”

In the United States, she completed a bachelor's degree in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University.

After working with the US company MCI, she, her husband and her brother-in-law set up a telecommunications company in 1993, which they later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars — a move that helped fund Ansari’s passion for the space industry.

Ansari cofounded Prodea Systems, which offers digital solutions, including linking people to home automation devices and other services available through online platforms. The Ansari family sponsored the 2004 Ansari X Prize, a $10 million reward intended to inspire research and development into technology for space exploration.

When Anousheh was 35, Fortune magazine listed her as one of only two women in its America’s 40 most successful business figures under the age of 40. “I have a lot of roots in Iran and feel very close to the Iranian people and the culture of the country,” she told the magazine.

In spring of 2006, the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation (FSA) announced that Anousheh Ansari was going to travel to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, making her the first female space tourist, a term she disapproves of.

“I don’t like the term ‘space tourism’ or ‘space tourist’ because I feel that it doesn’t do justice to what we do as ‘spaceflight participants’ or explorers,” she said in an interview with the European Space Agency in 2007. “A ‘tourist’ is someone who decides to go somewhere, buys a ticket, takes their camera, packs a bag and goes. For this experience, I had to train for six months in Star City, perform physical and mental training, learn all the systems of the space station and the Soyuz rocket.”

Ansari trained as a backup for Daisuke Enomoto, a Japanese businessman, for the flight to the International Space Station. On August 21, 2006, Enomoto was medically disqualified from flying the Soyuz TMA-9 mission. The next day Ansari was elevated to the prime crew.

A few days before her flight, she was asked in an interview whether she considered herself a role model for Iranian women and women in general. “I hope to inspire everyone—especially young people, women, and young girls all over the world, and in Middle Eastern countries that do not provide women with the same opportunities as men—to not give up their dreams and to pursue them.”

“Looking at it from up there you can't see any borders or any differentiation between different races or anything like that and all you see is one planet; one place that all of us have to take care of if we want to be able to live on it for a long time,” she said. “Our current technologies and everything we have does not afford us the luxury of saying OK if we blow up this planet and make it inhabitable for ourselves [because] we can pack up and live someplace else.”

Prior to the 2006 mission, Ansari had planned to wear a spacesuit featuring both the US flag and an Iranian flag without the government-specific emblem on it. Russian and NASA officials insisted she did not wear the Iranian flag officially, but she did keep the flag on her official flight patch and wore the colors of the Iranian flag. 

On September 18, 2006, taking her seat on board the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft, Ansari lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, together with NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin.

Ansari spent a total of nine days in space and aboard the International Space Station. During this time, she conducted a series of experiments on behalf of the European Space Agency in the area of human physiology, including consequences of space radiation on ISS crew members and different species of microbes that have made a home for themselves on the space station, how changes in muscles influence lower back pain and researching the mechanisms behind anemia. She also became the first person to post a blog from space.

Ansari landed safely in Kazakhstan on September 29 with U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov. She was given red roses from an unidentified official, and a kiss from her husband, Hamid.

She is thought to have paid at least $20 million for her holiday in space

In an interview in 2012, Ansari said she believed more world leaders should be sent into space. If this happened, she said, “their policies will be much different than the policies they have today.” She said the time she spent in space means she now only thinks of problems in terms of global solutions.

On February 26, 2017, Ansari and Iranian-American NASA scientist Firouz Naderi received the Oscar for best foreign-language picture on behalf of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi. Farhadi boycotted the awards in protest of President Donald Trump's executive order banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States.

In a statement read out by Ansari, Farhadi said the boycott was “out of respect for the people of my country and those of other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the US.” 

Anousheh Ansari has received numerous honors and awards. In 2010, published her memoir, My Dream of Stars, which was co-authored by Homer Hickam.