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Kabul: A private rocket carrying the first Arab woman astronaut has blasted off on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher from Saudi Arabia, was joined on Sunday’s mission by fellow Saudi Ali al-Qarni, a fighter pilot.
The pair are the first Saudi astronauts to voyage into space in decades.
They took off on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in the southern United States.
They will reach the space station in their capsule on Monday morning and will spend just over a week there before returning home with a splashdown off the coast of the southern US state of Florida.
“Hello from outer space! It feels amazing to be viewing Earth from this capsule,” Barnawi said after settling into orbit.
The mission is the second private flight to the space station organised by Houston-based Axiom Space.
After decades of shunning space tourism, NASA now embraces it with two private missions planned yearly. The Russian Space Agency has been doing it, off and on, for decades.
