KhalifaSat, the UAE’s first locally built satellite, is set to be launched into its orbit in 2017, said His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, as he visited the Emirates Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (Eiast) yesterday.
“We have launched today, thanks Almighty Allah, executive steps to build the first UAE-made satellite, the first such breakthrough in the Arab world,” Shaikh Mohammad told millions of his twitter followers.
Shaikh Mohammad said the KhalifaSat, named after President His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, will be launched into its orbit in 2017.
“Our confidence in children of the UAE has no limits, so are our ambitions and success is always granted by Almighty Allah,” Shaikh Mohammad tweeted proudly over self-sufficiency in constructing own satellites.
The KhalifaSat will be the third after DubaiSat1 and DubaiSat2, which have been built in Seoul, under a knowledge-sharing arrangement with the South Korean company Satrec.
While launching the project, Shaikh Mohammad said ‘’KhalifaSat is a message to all Arabs that Arab ushering into the space era is neither out of reach nor impossible and our State will be a leader in this industry as long as we have the confidence and courage to enter into competition with major countries in this field.
A national team including forty-five Emirati engineers is working on building the KhalifaSat, which, according to Shaikh Mohammad, catapults the Arab world into a new era of space industry and competition in space technologies.
Source : http://www.albawaba.com/business/orbit-uae-space-technology-khalifa-543778
