UAE astronauts Noura Al Matrooshi and Mohammed Al Mulla, have begun training for spacewalks at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in the United States of America.
At the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, the astronauts spend seven hours underwater wearing spacesuits, to encounter a similar weightlessness experience while in space.
The astronauts are part of the NASA Astronaut Candidate Class of 2021, where they will graduate in 2025. They are currently undergoing training for future space missions.
The first women astronaut in the UAE, Noura Al Matrooshi, along with Mohammed Al Mulla, are the latest recruits, as part of the UAE Astronaut Programme. The astronauts join Hazzaa Ali Al Mansouri, who is an Emirati astronaut that embarked on the UAE’s first scientific mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019, followed by Sultan Al Neyadi, currently on the six-month-long Arab mission aboard the ISS.
