Anousheh Ansari, Just in Time

Anousheh Ansari flys into space just in time to show us the absurdity of ethnic and religious conflict between the Middle East and the West. Ansari is a poke in the eye of an Iranian regime that degrades women. She is a poke in the eye to Western bigots who think that all Middle Easterners are good at is being over sensitive to percieved religious slights. She is an example of the best of what this Earth can produce: a powerful dreamer who can warp reality to match her own dream.

She did it with the X-Prize. She is doing it now with the ISS. Robert Heinlien (himself a great proponent of privatly funded spaceflight) would have been suprised, but I daresay not displeased, that THE leading figure of the privatization of space flight effort today would be of Iranian descent, and a woman.

You go, girl.

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