Anousheh Ansari

Anousheh Ansari (born Anousheh Raissyan on 12 September 1966 in Mashhad, Iran) is an Iranian-American engineer and entrepreneur, CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, who in 2006 became the fourth self-funded space tourist and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station. ¹

The Arabic article describes her as the first Muslim woman and the first Iranian to reach space, a description the museum presents attributed to its source. ²

Ansari was born in Mashhad and moved with her parents to Tehran shortly afterward; her parents divorced when she was six, and she has a sister, Atousa Raissyan, five years younger; the English article recounts that as a child she would sleep overnight on her grandparents' balcony, gazing at the night sky, very curious about space. ¹

At seven she attended the Jeanne d'Arc French Catholic school in Tehran, where half the day was taught in Farsi and half in French; she witnessed the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and during the Iran–Iraq War she sheltered in the basement of her apartment building, where, as the eldest of the sheltering children, she narrated stories to comfort them and distract them from the bombs falling outside. ¹

She immigrated to the United States in 1984 as a teenager and attended Lake Braddock high school in Northern Virginia; besides her native Persian she is fluent in English and French, and acquired a working knowledge of Russian for her spaceflight. ^{1 2}

She received her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and her master's degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. ^{1 2}

After graduation Ansari began work at MCI, where she met her future husband, Hamid Ansari; they married in 1991. ^{1 2}

In 1993 she persuaded her husband and her brother-in-law Amir Ansari to co-found Telecom Technologies Inc. with her, using their savings and corporate retirement accounts as deregulation happened in the US telecommunications industry; the Richardson, Texas company supplied softswitch technology integrating existing telecom networks with next-generation networks. ^{1 2}

Telecom Technologies was acquired by Sonus Networks in 2001 in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $440 million, and Ansari became a vice president of Sonus and general manager of its new INtelligentIP division. ¹

In 2006 she co-founded Prodea Systems, a technology and services management company, becoming its chairwoman and CEO, before becoming CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation. ^{1 2}

Ansari is a member of the XPRIZE Foundation's Board of Trustees and Vision Circle, and on 5 May 2004 — the 43rd anniversary of Alan Shepard's sub-orbital spaceflight — she and Amir Ansari made a multimillion-dollar contribution to the foundation, whose first prize, worth $10 million, was officially renamed the Ansari X Prize in their family's honour. ¹

She is a spokesperson for the "privatization of space", enabling commercially viable companies to send equipment and people into space independently of governments, and her family also invested in a partnership with Space Adventures and the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation to create a fleet of suborbital spaceflight vehicles for global commercial use. ¹

Through Space Adventures, Ansari trained as a backup for Daisuke Enomoto for a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station; when Enomoto was medically disqualified on 21 August 2006, she was elevated to the prime crew the next day. ^{1 2}

She said before her departure that she hoped to inspire everyone — especially young people, women, and young girls all over the world and in Middle Eastern countries that do not provide women the same opportunities as men — not to give up their dreams and to make the opportunities for them happen. ¹

She lifted off aboard Soyuz TMA-9 on 18 September 2006 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, with commander Mikhail Tyurin and flight engineer Michael López-Alegría; the spacecraft docked with the International Space Station on 20 September, making her the fourth space tourist in history and the first self-funded woman to reach the station; the Arabic article gives the cost of her flight as $20 million, while the English article notes that her contract did not allow disclosure of the amount and that previous tourists had paid more than $20 million. ^{1 2}

During her nine-day stay aboard the station she performed four experiments on behalf of the European Space Agency, including researching the mechanisms behind anaemia, how changes in muscles influence lower back pain, and the consequences of space radiation on crew members and on the species of microbes that have made a home on the station. ¹

She landed safely aboard Soyuz TMA-8 on 29 September 2006 on the steppes of Kazakhstan north of Arkalyk, with astronauts Jeffrey Williams and Pavel Vinogradov, was given red roses and a kiss from her husband Hamid, and the crew were flown by helicopter to Kustanai for the welcome ceremony. ^{1 2}

This section should be read as a presentation of positions reported by the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

Ansari describes herself as a "spaceflight participant" rather than a "space tourist", and Russian space officials, according to the Arabic article, rejected the tourist label attached to her, pointing to the scientific programme she carried out during her stay on the station. ^{1 2}

She had intended to wear the United States flag on her spacesuit alongside a politically neutral version of the Iranian flag — the simple three-colour flag with no government-specific emblem — to honour the two countries that had contributed to her life; at the insistence of NASA and Russian officials she did not wear the Iranian flag officially but wore its colours instead and kept the flag on her official flight patch, and she and her husband said no political message was intended. ¹

Her crewmate Michael López-Alegría expressed doubts before the flight about receiving "tourists" on a station still under construction, then later said private tourists had become essential to the survival of the Russian space programme, itself important to the US programme, while her commander Mikhail Tyurin described her as "very professional", saying it felt as if they had worked together for a decade. ¹

The flight received wide coverage in Iran: state television broadcast an hour-long live interview with her on the show Night Sky (Asemane Shab), on which she had also appeared the day before her departure; Iranian newspapers published daily columns about her journey, and the astronomy magazine NOJUM organised gatherings when the station passed over Iran's cities. ¹

With the American engineer Homer Hickam, Ansari co-wrote her memoir My Dream of Stars, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010, recounting her journey from Mashhad and Tehran to the International Space Station. ¹

At the 2017 Academy Awards she accepted, with Firouz Naderi, the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar on behalf of the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi for The Salesman, after Farhadi boycotted the ceremony in protest at United States travel restrictions. ¹

Her honours include the George Mason University Entrepreneurial Excellence Award, the George Washington University Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Southwest Region, and the Horatio Alger Award; she was listed in Fortune magazine's 40 under 40 in 2001, won Working Woman's National Entrepreneurial Excellence award in 2000, and in 2009 received the first NCWIT Symons Innovator Award; under her leadership Telecom Technologies earned recognition in Inc. magazine's 500 fastest-growing companies and Deloitte & Touche's Fast 500 technology companies. ¹

Ansari married Hamid Ansari in 1991 after meeting him at MCI, and now lives in Plano, Texas. ^{1 2}

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.