Photo by Nicole Sepulveda.
Anousheh Ansari is the CEO of XPRIZE, a nonprofit that organizes multi-million-dollar competitions to support scientific innovation that benefits humanity. She is the first female private space explorer and first Muslim woman in space. Before sitting on the panel for “What Makes a Great California Idea?,” part of the inaugural CalMatters Ideas Festival, she joined us in the green room to talk about the “spinning chair” training, Persian cuisine, and exploring space.
What are you reading these days?
I just finished The Three-Body Problem. I’m on book two now [of the trilogy]. I started before I knew there was a show coming out. And as I finished it, the Netflix series came out. You can tell the differences because they sort of Westernized the series. But the themes of the story are the same.
Who is your dream dinner guest (dead or alive)?
Albert Einstein.
And what would you serve Albert?
I would serve some Persian food. Some basmati rice and crispy rice, which we call tahdig. And a chicken stew with walnuts and pomegranate sauce.
What made you become a “space tourist”?
I don’t want to call myself a space tourist because I trained as a full astronaut for a whole year in Russia. I don’t think people who are tourists actually train for the trips. It was my dream to go to space. All my life I looked for ways to get there. I found the path when I was 40, but my love of cosmology and understanding the universe—Where we are in it? What role do we play? Where did it come from? Where it’s going?—All these questions are what has created my passion for space.
You were in space for 11 days. What was the most surprising thing about space?
How much I loved it and didn’t want to come back! I felt a sense of freedom when I was in space that I’ve never felt in my life since or before. For those 11 days, I was detached from everything—from problems, from worries, from everything in life that’s complicated. The same way I was free from gravity, I was free from everything else.
What was the hardest part of training?
There was one specific way to help you with your vestibular system and motion sickness. It’s called the spinning chair. You sit on a mechanical chair on an axle that then spins you in one direction for 10 minutes and then spins you the other direction for 10 minutes; it’s trying to make you sick. It was not pleasant at all.
What is your favorite Persian word?
Omid. It means hope.
Tell us a little bit about the inspiration behind the XPRIZE.
The X-Prize was the brainchild of Peter Diamandis, the founder of the organization, after reading a book about how Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris to win a prize. And the success of that flight created a mind shift and really gave birth to the modern-day aviation industry. So he wanted to kickstart the commercial space industry with a prize, and that’s when he designed the XPRIZE that eventually my family and I sponsored. I would say that it’s had a bigger impact than the Orteig Prize [that Lindbergh won], in a sense that [the Ansari XPRIZE has] changed regulations, shifted mindsets, and really moved the industry forward at an exponential rate.
When you think of California what do you think of?
Ocean.
What is one of the greatest ideas you’ve ever had?
An idea that I think would be really good—and am hoping will inspire others because I don’t want to start another company—is to see someone actually move our data centers to orbit now that the costs of access to space have been reduced. We have computers and solar panels in space, and space is cold. These large data centers that are growing rapidly can reside in orbit to reduce the footprint on Earth.