UAE astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi completes final training ahead of ISS mission next month

The UAE astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi, who will be the first Arab astronaut to spend six months on the International Space Station (ISS), has completed the final training week in the US.

AlNeyadi underwent training at SpaceX in the US along with other crew members. He was selected from over 4,000 Emirati astronauts for the mission.

The mission is set to take off in February 2023.

Taking to Twitter, the UAE astronaut shared a photo along with other crew members upon completing the final training week.

“Crew-6 has finished a final training week here at SpaceX… Soon we will launch onboard a similar one from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre,” he said.

In a photo he shared on his Twitter account, AlNeyadi is flanked by crew commander Stephen Bowen, pilot Warren Hoburg, and Russian mission specialist Andrei Fedyaev. This is the first space flight for Hoburg, AlNeyadi, and Fedyaev. It is the fourth space mission for Bowen.

AlNeyadi is one of the first two astronauts from the UAE. He served as backup for Hazzaa AlMansoori for the country’s first mission to the ISS in September 2019, for which he also received training.

He began the training in September 2018 at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscow. He also underwent training in Houston, Texas, and Cologne, Germany, as part of partnership agreements with major space agencies, including Nasa, the European Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa).

Launch date

• Look: Dubai’s Palm Islands star in incredible photos of UAE coast taken from space