On July 22, 1987, Muhammed Faris, a Syrian military aviator, made history as the first Syrian, and the second Arab, in space.
He also set another relatively unknown record.
“I brought with me a vial carrying soil from Damascus,” says the major general, who is credited with carrying the first recorded Earth dirt into space.
Speaking on the phone in an exclusive interview with The National, Gen Faris, who’s from Aleppo, a city deeply embroiled in continuing conflict and destruction, now lives in Turkey with his family.
“It would take me days to describe the feeling of going up there, seeing Planet Earth, seeing Syria from above, and that sense of pride of accomplishing something historic for my country and for the Arabs,” says the 63-year-old father of four boys and one girl.
“When you go up there, you realise there are no borders, no countries, no nationalities. Just Earth. Mother Earth,” he says. “We should protect this Earth, as who hurts their mother?”
His space journey was two years after the flight into space on an American shuttle by the Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, who holds the records as the first Arab, first Muslim and first royal to go into space.
“It was an era of exploration, of passion and breaking new ground,” Gen Faris says.
Fluent in Russian, he spent two years training and preparing in Moscow after being selected as part of the Interkosmos programme, a space programme designed to help the Soviet Union’s allies with manned and unmanned space missions. Then a colonel in the Syrian air force, he trained with another Syrian air force pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Munir Habib, who ended up being part of the back-up crew and did not fly into space.
Original article by Rym Ghazal
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