Sarah Al Amiri, 35, was the UAE's Minister of State for Advanced Science when I visited Dubai in February; she's since become the country's minister for public education and future technology. She had been obsessed with space since she was a child, but with an Emirates space industry an unlikely proposition, she studied computer engineering instead. By the time she graduated, at age 22, what would become the UAE's space agency had begun to take shape. Al Amiri ended up working as a software engineer on two of the UAE's earlier satellite projects, DubaiSat-1 and 2. By the time UAESA was touting the benefits of Hope's forthcoming mission, Al Amiri was both the project's science lead and also the country's minister for state for advanced sciences.
