UAE: Meet the expat preparing to take off on Blue Origin’s spaceflight

Blue Origin’s fifth human spaceflight carrying UAE expat Hamish Harding on is now scheduled to take off in June.

Speaking to Khaleej Times, the British expat in Dubai, Hamish Harding, opened up about his training ahead of the suborbital flight, his bucket list, how the private sector is changing the space industry and how he had to lose eight kilos to be on the aerospace company’s upcoming space tourism flight.

UAE expat for 14 years, Hamish Harding will be one of the six people on a brief trip to the high frontier that was originally supposed to take off on May 20. He explained how NS-21 will take him 106km above the ground as he prepares to blaze new trails. He underlined: “The last flight I went on, a couple weeks ago was 30 parabolas. They fly these flight paths — amazing parabolas and it gives you Zero G inside the cabin of the aircraft. One gets 25 seconds per parabola of flying around weightless. So, that was good practice. Also, I did have to lose some weight — not because I was overweight, but the issue was, I was the last astronaut on, out of the six and so there was a capsule limit.

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“If I was going to get on board, I had to meet the remaining weight in the capsule. So, you get a choice. If you go to space, you lose the weight, or you don't go to space. So, you soon diet effectively. So, I lost eight kilos in four weeks. We had a wonderful dietitian in the US who made sure my diet was very strictly controlled. In summary, it was a zero carb, zero dairy, only light protein diet,” added the 50-year-old man who is the chairman of Action Aviation, which deals in buying and selling business jets.

Zero gravity training

Harding has undergone training in the zero gravity Boeing aircraft, Boeing 727, by the Zero-G Corporation which is said to be an efficient aircraft for simulating Zero G.

While he has done a fair bit of training, the mission had to be delayed because of a technical fault that was announced by Blue Origin. He added: “The obvious one was that we did hit a technical problem. I’m an aviation guy and we have a saying in aviation called “AOG” – when an aircraft has an issue, it’s aircraft on the ground and you can't go flying. So, I invented a new term; “ROG,” rocket on the ground.”

“There was a minor malfunction but once you discover it, you must get it fixed. If it had happened in the actual mission, it wouldn't have caused a problem. It was a backup to the backup. But once you find it on the ground, you obviously have to fix it. They found it at L minus 3 which is launch minus three days, so we finished our training up to L minus 3 and we're going to go back and resume from L minus 2 onwards and go back to full launch once we have the final date. So, we are now looking through a slight postponement into June.”

“I think the UAE should partner with Blue Origin. I’ve been involved in Blue Origin for a while and it's an incredibly effective company. They're just so laser-focused on the success of mass market space. I think there should be a second Blue Origin launch site. Today, the New Shepard rocket openly launches from the Texas desert, but we have a bit of desert in the UAE. I think we should offer an area of desert to Blue Origin to be a second launch site from this side of the world.”