A desire for originality spurs Dubai spaceman

Salem Al Marri, the assistant director general for scientific and technical affairs at The Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) in Dubai, talks about his ambitions and the UAE's progress with space technology.

DubaiSat-1, which was launched in 2009. Courtesy EIAST

Sir Richard Branson claims that watching the first moon landing as a 19 year old made him determined that he, too, would experience the wonders of space.

There were no such teenage epiphanies, however, for Salem Al Marri, the assistant director general for scientific and technical affairs at The Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) in Dubai; rather, as a recent engineering graduate, it was the challenge of creating something new for his country that persuaded him to join the institute when it was incorporated in 2006.

“What got me hooked, basically [what] was the vision from the start, was that we would work to try and develop these satellites on our own and eventually build them in the UAE,” he says.

“When they approached me I thought it was a great opportunity to start working early in my career on something prestigious for the UAE, so I joined straight away.”

The first fruits of EIAST's labours came in 2009 with the launch of the observational satellite DubaiSat1, the first remote-sensing satellite to be fully owned by a UAE entity. This was followed in November last year with the launch of DubaiSat2, a similar satellite but one that offers far higher image resolution. While both were developed in conjunction with South Korea's Satrec Initiative, Emirati engineers have begun to shoulder an increasing amount of the work involved, says Mr Al Marri.

“DubaiSat 1 was basically a technology transfer process, where we worked from an existing satellite design that got us going. The second satellite, however, was a genuine joint development with our Korean partners,” he says.

Emirati engineers were involved in almost 70 per cent of the total build and design of the second satellite, according to the institute.

EIAST’s next project, KhalifaSat, will be its most ambitious. It will be the first satellite to be exclusively developed by Emirati engineers, with all assembly work being undertaken in this county. KhalifaSat’s image resolution is expected to be 30 per cent greater than that of DubaiSat2.

Work will soon begin on a manufacturing plant to assemble the satellite, alongside EIAST’s offices in Dubai, says Mr Al Marri.

“The vision of our rulers here is that we as Emiratis don’t take things easy. It would be simple just to outsource all of these things, but why not try to do these things on our own and develop this for the country? We don’t want to be a people that just buys in expertise.”

But developing a satellite “in house” is more than just a matter of national pride for EIAST. “It also gives you a very strong platform of expertise, which means we can work together with other countries, whether they’re countries with more experience that we can partner with and learn from, or ones that perhaps don’t have as much experience and can learn from us.”

EIAST is keen in its hiring policies to work with local academic institutions such as Khalifa University, the American University in Sharjah and Al Ain’s UAE University. About 90 per cent of the institute’s hires are sourced from universities in the UAE, says Mr Al Marri.

So what does the future hold for EIAST beyond KhalifaSat?

“It may be that we get into different kinds of satellites, we might grow and work with other companies. There are lots of government and private institutions working in space right now, and working with them would be a big opportunity,” he says.