Anousheh Ansari, the telecom founder who became the first woman to buy an orbital trip
As a six-year-old in Iran, Anousheh Ansari slept on her grandparents' balcony because the house had no air conditioning, staring up at the stars. In September 2006 she looked back down at Earth from the International Space Station, the first woman ever to pay her own way into orbit.
Born Anousheh Raissyan in Mashhad on September 12, 1966, she grew up in Tehran after her parents moved there, and from age seven attended a French Catholic school where lessons were split between Farsi and French. In the United States she studied electrical engineering and computer science at George Mason University and took a master's at George Washington University. At the phone company MCI she met Hamid Ansari, whom she married in 1991.
As the American telecom industry deregulated in 1993, she talked her husband and his brother Amir into pouring their savings and retirement accounts into a new venture, Telecom Technologies. Based in Richardson, Texas, it sold softswitch technology linking older phone networks with newer ones, and it landed on Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing companies. Fortune put her on its 40 under 40 list in 2001. She later co-founded Prodea Systems in 2006 and now heads the XPRIZE Foundation.
Space was never far away. Timing it to fall 43 years to the day after Alan Shepard rode a rocket on a brief suborbital arc, on May 5, 2004, she and Amir made a multimillion-dollar gift that renamed the $10 million contest the Ansari X Prize. She then trained as backup to Japanese businessman Daisuke Enomoto for a Soyuz flight. When doctors disqualified him on August 21, 2006, she moved into the prime crew the next day.
Soyuz TMA-9 lifted off from Baikonur on September 18, 2006, with commander Mikhail Tyurin and NASA's Michael López-Alegría. During nine days aboard the station she ran experiments for the European Space Agency on anaemia, back pain and radiation. She dislikes the term space tourist, preferring spaceflight participant, and her memoir My Dream of Stars, written with Homer Hickam, appeared in 2010.
Source: Anousheh Ansari
