Anousheh Ansari

Anousheh Ansari (née Raissyan; born September 12, 1966) is an Iranian American engineer and co-founder and chairwoman of Prodea Systems.

Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI).

The Ansari family is also the title sponsor of the Ansari X Prize.

She witnessed the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and recalls memories of 'hearing gun shots, screaming, people being killed, and explosions', her life, where she had never known violence of any kind, quickly turned upside down.

From revolution to 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.

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."

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.

On September 18, 2006, a few days after her 40th birthday, she became the first Iranian in space.

Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space tourist, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station.

In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems and was the current 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.

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.

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.

Asked what she hoped to achieve on her spaceflight, Ansari said, "I hope to inspire everyone—especially young people, women, and young girls all over the world, and in Middle Eastern countries that do not provide women with the same opportunities as men—not to give up their dreams and to pursue them... It may seem impossible to them at times. But I believe they can realize their dreams if they keep it in their hearts, nurture it, and look for opportunities and make those opportunities happen."

The day before her departure, she was interviewed on Iran national television for the astronomy show Night's Sky.

The hosts wished her success and thanked her on behalf of the Iranians.

Ansari in return thanked them.

Ansari lifted off on the Soyuz TMA-9 mission with commander Mikhail Tyurin (RSA) and flight engineer Michael Lopez-Alegria (NASA) at 04:59 (UTC) on Monday, September 18, 2006, from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Her memoir, My Dream of Stars, co-written with Homer Hickam, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

She is the CEO of the X Prize Foundation.

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 sleeping 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 the day was taught in Farsi and half in French.