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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anousheh Ansari | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anousheh_Ansari | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T12:32:42.086919+00:00 | kb-cron |
Anousheh Ansari (Persian: انوشه انصاری; née Raissyan; born September 12, 1966) is an Iranian-American engineer, space tourist, and entrepreneur. She is the co-founder and chairwoman of Prodea Systems, and her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and chief executive officer of Telecom Technologies, Inc. On September 18, 2006, she became the first Iranian person to be in outer space. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space tourist and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station. Her memoir My Dream of Stars, co-written with American engineer Homer Hickam, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. She is also the chief executive officer of the XPRIZE Foundation, and the Ansari family is the title sponsor of the Ansari X Prize.
== Early life == Born Anousheh Raissyan in Mashhad, Iran, she and her parents moved to Tehran shortly afterward. When Ansari was six years old, her parents divorced. Ansari has a sister, Atousa Raissyan, who is five years younger. At the age of six, Ansari would visit her grandparents and sleep overnight on the balcony, as there was no air conditioning. Ansari would gaze at the night sky and was very curious about space. In Tehran, at the age of seven, Ansari attended a French Catholic school called Jeanne d’Arc. Half of the day was taught in Farsi while the other half was taught in French. She witnessed the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and recalls memories of "hearing gun shots, screaming, people being killed, and explosions". From then on until the Iran–Iraq War, Ansari would have to take shelter in the basement of her apartment building, where she was the eldest of the children taking shelter. She would narrate stories to them, offering them comfort, which distracted them from the noise of bombs being dropped outside. Ansari immigrated to the United States in 1984 as a teenager, and attended a high school in Northern Virginia, Lake Braddock. Apart from her native Persian, she is fluent in English and French and acquired a working knowledge of Russian for her spaceflight experience. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and her master's degree at George Washington University in Washington D.C.
== Career == After graduation, Raissyan began work at MCI, where she met her future husband, Hamid Ansari. They married in 1991. In 1993, she persuaded her husband and her brother-in-law, Amir Ansari, to co-found Telecom Technologies Inc., using their savings and corporate retirement accounts, as deregulation happened in the US telecommunications industry. The company was a supplier of softswitch technology that enabled telecom "service providers to enhance system performance, lower operating costs and furnish new revenue opportunities." The company, headquartered in Richardson, Texas, offered products that allowed the integration between existing telecom networks and application-centric, next-generation networks via software switch technology. Telecom Technologies was acquired by Sonus Networks, Inc. in 2001 in a stock-for-stock transaction for 10.8 million shares of Sonus stock. Anousheh Ansari became "a vice president of Sonus and general manager of Sonus' new INtelligentIP division."
In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems, becoming its chairwoman and CEO. Prodea is a technology and services management company. Prodea is a privately held company formed by the Ansari family with development centers in Richardson, Texas, and Silicon Valley.
== Space == Ansari has expressed that she does not consider herself a "space tourist" and prefers the title of "spaceflight participant." Ansari is a member of the X PRIZE Foundation's Vision Circle, as well as its Board of Trustees. Along with her brother-in-law, Amir Ansari, she made a multimillion-dollar contribution to the X PRIZE foundation on May 5, 2004, the 43rd anniversary of Alan Shepard's sub-orbital spaceflight. The X PRIZE has officially renamed the Ansari X PRIZE to honor their donation. As demonstrated by her commitment to the X PRIZE and through presentations at Space Enthusiast conferences, Ansari is a spokesperson for the "privatization of space," a process enabling commercially viable companies to government-independently send equipment and people into space for exploration and other purposes. The Ansari family also invested in a partnership with Space Adventures, Ltd. and the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation (FSA) to create a fleet of suborbital spaceflight vehicles (the Space Adventures Explorer) for global commercial use.
=== Spaceflight === Ansari trained as a backup for Daisuke Enomoto for a Soyuz flight to the International Space Station, through Space Adventures, Ltd. On August 21, 2006, Enomoto was medically disqualified from flying the Soyuz TMA-9 mission that was due to launch the following month. The next day Ansari was elevated to the prime crew.