AN Iranian-born businesswoman who became the first female space tourist is to offer a £5m prize to encourage entrepreneurs to pioneer commercial flights to the moon.

Anousheh Ansari, 40, left Iran when she was a teenager, made a fortune in telecommunications and paid £10m for her 11-day round trip to the International Space Station (ISS) 220 miles above Earth last month. She hopes that her prize will trigger a space race that will give more people a chance to experience the “unique beauty” of space flight.

“The aim of the prize is to encourage the private sector to build a spacecraft to take people for trips to the moon and beyond,” said Ansari in her first newspaper interview since her return from space.

“I am confident that in 20 years’ time, private orbital flights will be a reality. Once a shuttle capable of making the trip to the moon is developed, I want to be one of the first people to fly on it.”

Ansari, who grew up in Tehran and moved to the United States aged 17 after the Islamic revolution, has already funded a £5m prize for the first manned sub-orbital space flight funded by private investors. Named the Ansari X prize, it was won by SpaceShipOne, whose inaugural flight was two years ago.

To make her own trip, Ansari spent six months training at Star City, the cosmonauts’ centre outside Moscow. She had to endure arduous sessions in a centrifugal chamber and spinning chair at eight times the force of gravity. She learnt Russian, underwent stringent medical tests and was taught how to cope with weightlessness.

Ansari was blasted into orbit at a cost to her of £45,000 per mile, alongside two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz rocket. Seeing the Earth moved her to tears.

“Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of the view,” she said. “It was breathtaking — watching the Earth from above without seeing borders, wars and divisions and realising how fragile the planet is. Every world leader should make the trip. They’d start to see things differently.”

Ansari became the first blogger from space. Her daily entries won her a huge following, not least from women in Iran who wrote to say her career and adventure had inspired them.

Describing the moment the Soyuz spacecraft docked with the ISS, Ansari said she got her first smell of space — something resembling a burnt almond biscuit — when her fellow cosmonauts opened the hatch.

Ansari said she hoped her experience would galvanise women living under Iran’s repressive regime. She had arrived in America without a word of English, but after graduating with a degree in electrical engineering she and her husband, Hamid, set up Telecom Technologies with a £20,000 investment. Eight years later they sold it for more than £400m.

“I hope young women in Iran and elsewhere are inspired by my flight. There’s nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” she said.

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