Once you’ve been to both poles, skydived over Mount Everest and set up your country’s first consulate in Monaco, the question is: what next?
For 37-year-old explorer Namira Salim the answer is easy — become the first Pakistani to go into space.
Her flight with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism project is planned for next year. Although no date has been fixed for the venture’s first commercial flight, she is looking forward to fulfilling a lifelong obsession.
“As a child I always believed I would go to space. It’s not that I read about it one fine day and thought of signing up. I’ve always said this was in my DNA,” she told AFP by Skype from Dubai.
“I must have been less than five years old and I was crying very hard. My father was trying to pacify me and I was like ‘I don’t want anything, I just want to go to space. I don’t want any toys, nothing, just send me to space.’”
But coming from a country with no major space programme of its own, where millions live in poverty, the journey to the stars was never likely to be straightforward.
Pressured by her father to study, she kept up her passion for space in her spare time, joining astronomy clubs and spending nights gazing at the desert skies after her family moved to the United Arab Emirates in the 1980s. “I always had this feeling that there was something very spiritual and divine associated with this whole thing,” she said of her ambition. “As if something was really pulling me there and calling out to me, and I had to be there and I belonged there.”
Chasing your dreams doesn’t always come cheap — Salim paid $200,000 to sign up with Virgin Galactic in 2007, funded with support from her family, who run a heavy construction equipment firm in the UAE. The weightless component of the flight will last for only a few minutes.
The cost is high by any standard — but a fraction of the $35 million US software pioneer Charles Simonyi paid for his 2007 trip to the International Space Station — and Salim insists it’s about more than just fulfilling the whims of the rich.
— Investing in peace —
Salim said the money she has paid is an investment in a commercial industry that will one day replace government space agencies and enable researchers, satellites — and tourists — to go up at a fraction of the current cost.
And she believes space travel can eventually play a role in world peace.
“We hope one day politicians could be taken up in space, and a space shuttle like this one we’ve built with Virgin is perfect for that. We could actually have peace summits and have conflict resolution in space.”
Her mission was big news in Pakistan at the time of her signing up for the trip, and when it finally does take place, the country’s freewheeling and patriotic media is likely to go into overdrive. She has already made headlines. In 2007 she became the first Pakistani to go to the North Pole, in 2008 the first Pakistani to go to the South pole and later the same year the first South Asian — not just Pakistani — to skydive over Mount Everest.
Stupid indians..why dont you just keep to your news websites? You will surely deny it but the very fact that you are here commenting a non-story reveals your sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the pakistanis!
You dont count as u barely qualify as humans for us…
but sometimes we go to see circus where animals try to perform some tricks…
ahahah and she is no astronaut. she is only a traveller, clowns… hahah
Wow.. peace in space…LOL
Now Pakistanis can only imagine to live in peace in space only as long as super powers dont plan space war their specially with nuclear war fare which are dumping in slave countries through hired nationals.
For this purpose they should hire the services of hameed gul like personals He can give them army of mujahids who will be ready to go to space in search of beautiful hoors there by wearing nuclear arsenal jackets
She is not an astronaut by the classical sense. She is just a sub-orbital space tourist who had enough money to buy a ticket for a brief jaunt in the space! You would think, by the euphoria in the press, that she was a member of the NASA spece crew!
ASTRONAUT! REALLY!
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Are you guys creep of some sort ?
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Does not matter what press say! She atleast has the gut to shoot up to a height that you guys never experienced.
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Are you sure that you won't wet your pants in a journey like her?
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Do you really understand what he is trying to say ? She can just feed some poor instead of going to space just to fart !!!!
As long as she doesn't want to make love in space it's ok
She is real adventural girl she sat the history already and i predict she will be a great named women one day keep it upward all of us with you and will always keep u in our prayers
It’s atleast a good step ahead, we pakistani’s always pass such comments and can’t see anyone progressing. She is not our caretaker and hence she has got right to make her dreams come true. If Allah has made her capable to afford all this expenses, who are we to disheart her
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