While Anousheh Ansari has been billed as the first female space tourist and the first Iranian-born person to fly in space, The Peninsula newspaper in Qatar profiles another prospective space traveler from that region of the world: Pakistani artist Namira Salim, who is one of Virgin Galactic’s founders. She is described in the article as “the first woman from the Middle East and Asia to fly into space on a commercial spaceship”, carefully distinguishing her from Ansari, who is flying on a noncommercial Soyuz. Salim, like Ansari, is an expat: she went to school in the US and now spends her time in Dubai and France.
The article calls her a “sculptor, musician, poetess, astrologist, peace activist and humanist”, but despite her many talents, she doesn’t have much of a presence online: a Google search on her name turns up few references other than articles about her pans to go to space; one of the few exceptions is this older article about her, which we mentioned here back in April.
[…] Reuters, meanwhile, (or, rather, “Reuters Life!”, exclamation mark included), has a brief profile of Namira Salim, who plans to be the first Pakistani-born woman in space by flying on Virgin Galactic. Salim has already gotten some media coverage, so there’s not much new here. Few of the reports have explained how Salim, described in the Reuters article as “a poet and an artist” (and elsewhere as a musician, “astrologist”, and peace activist) could scrape up the $200,000 for a flight. That’s a lot of poems. […]