Launch date for UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter set
The new colonial movement: Japan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have set the launch date for UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter, now scheduled for July 15 with a launch window that closes on August 13.
If all goes well it will enter Mars orbit in February 2021.
The probe is a UAE project in name only. Much of it was built in the U.S. by U.S. companies, working with UAE engineers and scientists. It is also being launched by Japan.
Regardless, the training and knowledge obtained by those UAE engineers and scientists is the real point of the mission. The UAE wants to diversify its economy away from oil, and it is trying to use the excitement of space exploration to do it. It hopes these engineers and scientists will use what they learned to come up with new projects that in the future will be built entirely in the UAE.
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The new colonial movement: Japan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have set the launch date for UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter, now scheduled for July 15 with a launch window that closes on August 13.
If all goes well it will enter Mars orbit in February 2021.
The probe is a UAE project in name only. Much of it was built in the U.S. by U.S. companies, working with UAE engineers and scientists. It is also being launched by Japan.
Regardless, the training and knowledge obtained by those UAE engineers and scientists is the real point of the mission. The UAE wants to diversify its economy away from oil, and it is trying to use the excitement of space exploration to do it. It hopes these engineers and scientists will use what they learned to come up with new projects that in the future will be built entirely in the UAE.
I must unfortunately ask you for your financial support because I do not depend on ads and rely entirely on the generosity of readers to keep Behind the Black running. You can either make a one time donation for whatever amount you wish, or you sign up for a monthly subscription ranging from $2 to $15 through Paypal or $3 to $50 through Patreon.
Your support will allow me to continue covering science and culture as I have for the past twenty years, independent and free from any outside influence.
Your support is even more essential to me because I not only keep this site free from advertisements, I do not use the corrupt social media companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook to promote my work. I depend wholly on the direct support of my readers.
You can provide that support to Behind The Black with a contribution via Patreon or PayPal. To use Patreon, go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. For PayPal click one of the following buttons:
If Patreon or Paypal don't work for you, you can support Behind The Black directly by sending your donation by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman, to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
Or you can donate by using Zelle through your bank. You will need to give my name and email address (found at the bottom of the "About" page). The best part of this electronic option is that no fees will be deducted! What you donate will be what I receive.
I don’t fancy arabs much. Few who have been in contact with them seems to like them. But the UAE seems to have an arab Prince who is at the best an arab can be. They focus on what arabs have done the best through history: Trade! And this ambitious program for modernization is very promising. Yes, almost all of their space know how is now imported, but they might take over more and more of it themselves. Note that they are not developing launchers with potential military use, they are (financing) developing of a scientific Mars orbiter. It carries three instruments, I read, which are not like the Indians gambling to make some sensational politically prestigious discovery of methane, but that fill three different seemingly mundane gaps in the fundamental understanding of Mars’ atmosphere. It’s excellent! Hope is a great name.
I can add that arabs before islam managed the very perilous step of trade between Asia and Egypt through the Saudi desert, in a time when sailing around it was not a safe or easy thing to do either. Tin from Afghanistan was the “oil” of the bronze age Mediterranean economy. I suppose that the Egyptians got much of it via the arabs. The Sun forced arab traders to travel only at night. Navigating the stars very carefully to not miss the oases their lives depended on as they went. It is comparable to what the Polynesians did to travel between islands in the Pacific. They do have an astronomical legacy in their pre-islamic culture.
The Arabs have had a long time to try building some sort of post-tribalist, post-monarchist social order. With the exception of minor, and probably too-little-too-late, efforts in the minor Gulf monarchies they have failed even to attempt the former and have entirely eschewed the latter.
When the oil runs out, and these nations cannot pay the army of imported technicians and medical professionals upon which their infrastructures depend, there will be mass death until the population of the Arabian peninsula returns to roughly what it was in the 19th century and the Arabs return to being merely minor and episodic nuisances to the civilized world as they were for centuries.
At a time when sailing around it [Arabia] was not a safe or easy thing to do
The Romans sent hundreds of ships from Egypt down the Red Sea thence directly across the Arabian Sea to India and back every year.