Iranian woman glazes track into space

She would spend hours and hours gazing at the stars and wondering, what's out there? Sometimes she wondered if there was another girl like her on another planet, gazing at the stars and thinking about the same things.

When Ansari was a teenager, she used to lie back outside and gaze at the sky and the stars till late. After 25 years, her dream has manifested into reality as Ansari and two astronauts are scheduled to blast off in a Russian Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Their space flight is scheduled to begin at 8:09 a.m. Moscow time.

Born on 12 September 1966 in Mashhad, Iran, Ansari is the co-founder and Chairman of Prodea Systems Inc. Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI).

Ansari emigrated to the United States in 1984 as a teenager who did not speak English, and received her Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer science at George Mason University. She received her master's degree electrical engineering from George Washington University.

Fascinated about space since her childhood, Ansari is happy to feel the experience firsthand. She is eager to see her home town from space as she has not visited it after her emigration. She wants to be a source of inspiration for the Iranian girls to take up science as a subject.

Anousheh's parents originally from Mashhad or Tabriz, relocated to Tehran after Anousheh was born in Mashhad in 1966. The family left Tehran for the US because of the Islamic revolution.

Prior to co-founding Prodea Systems, Anousheh, along with her husband Hamid and brother-in-law Amir, founded TTI in 1993. The company was acquired by Sonus Networks, Inc. in 2000. Her space tour will cost around $ 20 million, but Ansari can afford it since her company was sold for about $550 million in stock from the acquiring company.

However, the stock fell in value and the shareholders of the take over company sued Ansari and others for so called insider trading. The case is pending in a Massachusetts federal court.

This is not the first time that this adventurous lady has dipped into her personal wealth for the sake of space. In 2002, she had spent $10 millions to give an award to the first successful privately financed manned trip into space.

Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire had supported SpaceShipOne, which took the possession of Ansari X prize by making two flights to the edge of space more than 60 miles above California's Mojave Desert.

Ansari wants more people to take interest in space and believes that the X prize and her space travels will encourage them to do so. She also hopes for a lower price for space tourism by prodding private companies to join in the race.

Ansari, Hamid and a space-travel broker who works with the Russian space agency went to Kazakhstan in March to see the launch of a Soyuz rocket and capsule with a crew of three, including Russian Pavel Vinogradov and American Jeff Williams.

In the same month, Ansari joined cosmonaut training in Russia and at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. But up till late August, she was in training as a backup for Daisuke Enomoto for a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station, through Space Adventures, Ltd., the world's leading space tourism company.

On 21 August 2006, Daisuke Enomoto was medically disqualified from flying the Soyuz TMA-9 mission in September. The next day Ansari was elevated to the prime crew, and will go into space sooner than she expected, becoming the fourth, and first female, space tourist.

Most recently, Prodea, the Ansari family investment firm, has announced the formation of a partnership with Space Adventures, Ltd. and the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation (FSA) to create a fleet of suborbital spaceflight vehicles for global commercial use.

She will test some of the new technologies in her space trip and has also decided to write a blog from the space station.

Ansari was listed in Fortune magazine's "40 under 40" list in 2001 and honored by Working Woman magazine as the winner of the 2000 National Entrepreneurial Excellence award.

She was also chosen as the winner of the 1999 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Southwest Region, for the Technology and Communications category.

Ansari has authored numerous technical papers and has two patents for her work on Automated Operator Services and Wireless Service Node. She was a U.S. delegate at ITU SG VII, SG XI and SG XVII, and a representative at American National Standard Institute T1S1 and T1X1 Technical Subcommittees.

Those who know Ansari, describes her as a woman who knows how to dream as well as achieve them through her hard work.

Ansari has an interest in social entrepreneurship too. She has served on the boards of directors for the Make-a-Wish Foundation of North Texas and Collin County Children’s Advocacy Center. She works with a number of other non-profit organizations, including the Ashoka Foundation in its support of social entrepreneurs.

George Whitesides of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group that advocates space travel, said that there are a lot of white male astronomers and to have someone different is peachy.

“By reaching this dream I’ve had since childhood, I hope to tangibly demonstrate to young people all over the world that there is no limit to what they can accomplish,”-- Anousheh Ansari