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And although women make up almost 60% of all university graduates and 41% of those in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), converting this talent into a workforce, especially in science, has been recognized as a challenge (see ‘Science on the rise’). Data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization data show that the country produced no PhD graduates before 2010 - and in 2017, doctoral students made up less than 0.8% of the tertiary-education population, half the level for the Arab states overall. Emirati undergraduates tend to study engineering or business, but fewer than 5% pursue degrees in basic sciences, including medicine, or progress to PhD level. The country is not only running out of oil, but also faces major challenges in providing enough food and water for its population. “The government has been trying for years to create both alternative pathways and alternative incentives to have people aspire to something more than a low-effort government job,” he says. Although the UAE is famous for its breathtaking goals, its citizens are typically left with little ambition, says Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Throughout the Gulf, these factors have long made jobs in start-ups, the private sector or research less appealing. Some aspects of oil wealth have created long-term problems, especially the UAE’s high-paying government jobs and its generous subsidies for citizens, who make up just 12% of the population (which consists largely of immigrants).
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“Whatever the UAE has done since day one has been about survival,” says Sharaf.īut the very sectors that helped the UAE’s major cities to thrive have proved vulnerable to a series of economic crashes, and the Arab Spring rocked the region. Since then, oil wealth and bold infrastructure projects have helped to turn the desert nation into a global business, shipping and tourism hub and one of the richest countries in the world per capita. But Dubai’s Burj Khalifa - the world’s tallest building - and driverless metro system are a long way from the country’s beginnings as a group of impoverished communities from distinct tribes that joined forces in the wake of independence from the United Kingdom in 1971. Much of the UAE is so new it feels like the future. And the UAE government is now mulling involvement in future Moon missions and considering setting up the country’s first national grant-funding programme. Women make up 34% of the team (see ‘Women in Emirati science’) and 80% of the mission’s scientists. She has assembled a team of planetary scientists, who are ‘reprogrammed’ engineers, and the UAE’s top universities have in the past few years opened new degree courses in astronomy, physics and other basic sciences.
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It is early days, but there are hints that it is working, says Al Amiri, who is also the country’s minister for advanced sciences.
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The driver “is not space, it’s economic”, he says. Like major port and road ventures before it, the Mars mission is a mega-project designed to cause “a big shift in the mindset”, says Omran Sharaf, the mission’s project manager. Faced with economic and environmental challenges, the small, oil-rich Gulf state hopes the Mars project can accelerate its transformation into a knowledge economy - by encouraging research, degree programmes in basic sciences and inspiring the youth across the Arab states.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” says Landin.īut for Emiratis, space-science goals come second. The UAE hired the US engineer in an unusual partnership in which the Colorado team provided both mentoring and construction expertise. Progressing from Earth-orbiting satellites to a deep-space mission in six years is “incredible”, says Brett Landin, an engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder, who leads the mission’s spacecraft team. Sarah Al Amiri is science lead for the mission.