United Arab Emirates

The UAE Space Agency is twelve years old. In that time the country has put a probe in Mars orbit, sent an astronaut to the ISS, signed onto the Artemis Accords, committed to a 2028 mission to the asteroid belt, and become the first Arab nation to land hardware on the Moon (the Rashid rover aboard ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, lost on landing but the closest any Arab program had ever come). It has done all of this with a national space budget that is a small fraction of NASA's, and almost entirely by hiring expertise rather than building it from scratch.

The strategy is unusual and largely working. Most national space programs spend a generation building indigenous engineering capacity — graduate programs, government labs, prime contractors — before flying anything ambitious. The UAE chose the opposite path. The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), founded in 2006, partnered closely with the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics on the Hope Mars orbiter. Hope launched on a Japanese H-IIA in July 2020, entered Mars orbit on schedule in February 2021, and has been returning unique science on the Martian atmosphere ever since — particularly on the diurnal hydrogen and oxygen escape that no previous Mars mission has measured systematically.

In parallel, the country was building its astronaut corps. Hazza Al Mansoori flew an eight-day Soyuz mission to the ISS in 2019, becoming the first Arab astronaut. Sultan Al Neyadi followed in 2023 with a six-month rotation aboard Crew-6 — the longest spaceflight by any Arab national. Two more astronauts are in training. The UAE has also signed agreements to fly an astronaut to the Lunar Gateway in the 2028-2030 window, contingent on the broader Artemis schedule.

The asteroid mission, MBR Explorer, is the more interesting recent commitment. Targeted for launch in 2028, it would conduct a multi-asteroid tour through the main belt, performing flybys of six asteroids and rendezvousing with one. The architecture is being developed jointly with the University of Colorado (again) and the Italian space agency. The mission is technically ambitious — multi-target deep-space missions have historically been the hardest class of mission to pull off — and the UAE's ability to deliver it on schedule will say a lot about whether the partnership-led approach scales beyond Mars-orbit-class missions.

Where the UAE has a much more straightforwardly leading position is investment. The country's sovereign-wealth funds — Mubadala, ADIA, ADQ — have been some of the most active institutional investors in the global commercial space sector since 2020. Mubadala is a major shareholder in Yahsat (the regional satellite-communications operator), Bayanat (Earth-observation analytics), and Al Yah Satellite Communications. ADQ has invested directly in commercial space-technology funds. The UAE is also building a regulatory environment specifically to attract foreign space companies: the Abu Dhabi Investment Office is offering significant tax incentives and accelerated licensing to space-tech companies that incorporate locally. Several US and European startups have set up Abu Dhabi subsidiaries on those terms.

What's missing is a domestic launch capability and a deep commercial supply chain — both gaps the country is openly aware of and not currently trying to fill. The UAE is unlikely to ever be a launch-vehicle producer; the geography, the workforce scale, and the strategic priorities don't argue for it. What it is much more likely to become is the dominant capital and partnership hub for the broader Middle East and North Africa space sector, alongside Saudi Arabia (which is moving aggressively in a similar direction with the Saudi Space Commission). The next decade for the UAE space program will be defined less by the missions it flies than by the volume of capital it deploys into the global industry. Both numbers are likely to keep going up.