Anousheh Ansari

Anousheh Ansari is an Iranian-American engineer and entrepreneur who became the first female private spaceflight participant and the first person of Iranian descent to fly in space, traveling to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in September 2006 as a paying passenger. She co-funded the Ansari X Prize, a competition that helped spur development of private crewed spacecraft, and she later became chief executive of the XPRIZE Foundation.