This story has been deservedly getting a good deal of attention lately. Thirty-nine-year-old Iranian-American success story Anousheh Ansari, who with her family sponsored the Ansari X-Prize competition that Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne team won in 2004, is about to become the world’s first female space tourist on September 18th — something it’s exceedingly unlikely she’d ever have been able to achieve in her native Iran, due not only to technical and economic limitations, but to cultural restrictions on the choices available to women as well.
The front page of the X-Prize Foundation website says Ansari will be blogging the experience from space.
Good for her, I say, and good for this new era of space travel that we’ve begun to see unfold. Three cheers for freedom, science, and the human spirit of adventure!
UPDATE 9-16: Anousheh’s weblog can be found at http://spaceblog.xprize.org.
