Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) is Dubai's government space organization established in 2006 and named for UAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, responsible for coordinating the UAE's space program and developing indigenous space engineering capabilities — producing some of the most ambitious space achievements in the Arab world within a remarkably compressed timeline.

MBRSC's landmark mission is the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), known as Hope (Al Amal). Launched in July 2020 aboard a Mitsubishi H-IIA rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Centre, Hope entered Mars orbit on February 9, 2021, making the UAE only the fifth entity (after the Soviet Union, NASA, ESA, and ISRO) to successfully orbit Mars. Hope studies the Martian atmosphere's daily and seasonal weather cycles, dust storm dynamics, and atmospheric loss of hydrogen and oxygen — providing comprehensive atmospheric characterization data distributed freely to the global scientific community as a condition of MBRSC's mission design.

MBRSC operates the DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2 Earth observation satellites and led the Emirates Lunar Mission — the Rashid rover launched aboard ispace's M1 lander in December 2022. Although the ispace lander crashed during touchdown in April 2023, MBRSC gained valuable lunar mission operations and systems engineering experience. The UAE Astronaut Programme produced landmark achievements: Hazza AlMansouri became the first Emirati in space (ISS Expedition 61, 2019), and Sultan AlNeyadi completed a six-month long-duration ISS mission in 2023 as the first Arab astronaut on an extended spaceflight, performing six spacewalks.