ABU DHABI — Six years after the historic launch of the Hope Probe, the engineers who cut their teeth on the UAE’s inaugural interplanetary flight have taken the helm of the country’s most ambitious deep-space endeavor yet: a 5-billion-kilometer mission into the main asteroid belt.
Known as the MBR Explorer, the spacecraft is slated to launch in March 2028 aboard Japan’s H3 rocket. Over a seven-year journey featuring gravity-assist flybys past Venus, Earth, and Mars, the probe will survey six asteroids before rendezvousing in 2034 with its primary destination, 269 Justitia, where it will deploy a surface lander.
According to Salem Butti Al Qubaisi, Director-General of the UAE Space Agency, the mission represents the maturation of domestic aerospace capability. The young engineers who entered the sector as trainees on the Emirates Mars Mission are now serving as program managers, systems architects, and team leads for the MBR Explorer.
Strategic Ownership Over Total Independence
Twice the size and roughly 1,000 kg heavier than Hope, the MBR Explorer has already passed its Critical Design Review (CDR) and entered the assembly, integration, and testing phase.
Rather than attempting full self-reliance across all aerospace verticals, the UAE Space Agency has adopted a targeted localization strategy:
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Sovereign Capabilities First: The UAE prioritizes critical segments that deliver national and commercial value, relying on global partners for infrastructure it does not own, such as heavy-lift orbital launch facilities.
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Domestic Hardware Development: Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute is designing and testing the lander destined for asteroid Justitia.
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Private-Sector Integration: Half of the wider asteroid mission’s contracts and engineering assignments are dedicated to UAE-based companies and tech startups.
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Industrial Tech Transfer: Initiatives like the Sirb Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellation are structured to build domestic supply chains, retain intellectual property, and localize high-value payload development.
Economic Returns in the Global Space Race
The strategic pivot reflects targets under the UAE’s National Space Strategy 2031, which mandates doubling national space revenues, boosting economic value added by 60%, and establishing the country among the top 10 global space economies.
The benchmark of success has shifted beyond flag-planting scientific milestones to creating a self-sustaining commercial ecosystem capable of engineering high-risk, deep-space hardware.
