She was the world’s first Muslim woman in space. Now she’s helping bring more people online

If you ask me what my greatest dream is, I’ll probably tell you it’s going to space. It doesn’t even have to be that far out – a round trip to the International Space Station and back will do (can you tell I’m thinking small here?). Since there’s little chance of me doing that anytime soon, though, I could settle for shaking hands with someone who’s already been there.

I guess I can cross that one off the ol’ bucket list.

Anousheh Ansari is a computer scientist, an entrepreneur, and the first Muslim woman to go to space – not to mention the first woman to do so using her own funds. I caught up with her much closer to the ground, in Singapore, where she flew in to support the UN Women Singapore Committee for ending violence against women.

Stargazer

Going to space was Anousheh’s life-long dream, along with becoming an astrophysicist. Growing up in her homeland, Iran, she would lie in her balcony and get lost in the night skies, dreaming she would one day be among the stars. “I was fascinated by the sheer mystery of space, what’s out there, what’s it like, and how I could get there,” she says.

Anousheh Ansari in her space suit.

The stars looked pretty far away in 1984, five years after the Iranian revolution, when she and her family left the country for a better life in the United States. There she studied electrical engineering and computer science. After meeting her husband, Hamid Ansari, she went into the telecommunications business. Together, they founded telecommunications company Telecom Technologies in 1993.

To put that into context, 1993 was the year when Marc Andreessen and his team released Mosaic, the first web browser.

Telecom Technologies developed a method for enabling voice communications over the internet. In 2001, it merged with IP-based voice infrastructure products company Sonus Networks, in a US$750 million deal. It was the middle of the US dotcom crash.

The tech business landscape is a very different world today, but some things still apply. “When we started the company, the principles of a startup were innovation and speed, which is the same now in Silicon Valley,” she says.

But she feels that back then building a business was much more of a long-term thing. “Sometimes I look at the companies that pop up every day in Silicon Valley and I question what the business model is, how they are going to ever make money, or protect their IP.”

She is concerned about founders coming straight out of college and founding companies (“If Andreessen has his way, even before they’ve finished college,” she quips). At that stage, they may not have the experience and the sense of responsibility she feels is required to run a successful company. “But it’s a different landscape, it’s hard for me to even try to compare,” she says.

New ventures

In 2006, she co-founded her latest company, Prodea Systems, where she is currently chairman and CEO. Prodea started out of a simple idea: to use technology to make every-day life easier, Anousheh tells me. That sounds more than a little vague, but keep in mind the world hadn’t even seen the iPhone at that point.

Prodea is a platform that allows several different kinds of devices to talk to it, with the purpose of gathering data and providing useful results. “We sit in the core of someone’s digital life and bring all the services together in one platform,” Anousheh explains.

Social impact

Per aspera ad astra

Be the change