On 9 February 2021, an Emirati spacecraft called Hope entered orbit around Mars. The country that launched it had not had a space agency at all until 2014. In May 2026, the UAE Space Agency is almost twelve years old, the Hope probe is still operating. 

The next stated milestone, for the UAE to be among the top ten global space economies by 2031.

What the UN body actually is

The “seat at the UN’s new space-safety body” is more specific than it sounds. In June 2025, the UAE submitted a formal proposal to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) to establish an Expert Group on Space Situational Awareness under the Working Group on the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities. The Committee accepted the proposal at its sixty-eighth session, and the new Expert Group was established. According to the Office of Space Commerce’s reporting of the decision, the proposal drew supportive statements from the United States, France, the UK, China, Russia, Japan, India, Egypt, Nigeria, and Brazil, among others.

The context is straightforward. There are now more than 12,000 satellites operating in orbit, associated with more than 70 nations, and the existing patchwork for tracking them and avoiding collisions has not kept up. The Expert Group is a coordination forum, not a regulator, but it is the venue where the next set of norms around space situational awareness is likely to take shape.

How twelve years got here

The UAE Space Agency was established in 2014, the same year the Hope mission was announced. The probe was built in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University, and the University of California Berkeley, launched on a Japanese H-IIA rocket from Tanegashima on 20 July 2020, and arrived at Mars on 9 February 2021.

The country has continued building since Hope.

A 2023 lunar rover mission, Rashid 1, was lost. A later investigation attributed the failure to an altitude miscalculation. A second lunar rover, Rashid 2, has been developed. The next major mission, MBR Explorer, the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt, is being developed and is protected to launcd  in March 2028. 

What the 2031 strategy actually says

The “top ten” framing comes from the National Space Strategy 2031, an update to the earlier National Space Strategy 2030. According to reports, the goals are to double space economy revenues, rank the UAE among the top ten global space economies by 2031, and double the number of national space companies. 

TWhat “top ten” is being measured against is left somewhat open. Existing rankings of space economies are inconsistent and depend on whether the question is government spending, revenue from space activities, satellite ownership, or some weighted combination. The UAE’s framing leans on a basket of economic metrics rather than any single league table.

What to watch

The 2031 milestone is five years out, and the trajectory into it looks strong. In just over a decade, the UAE has gone from no space agency at all to an operational Mars orbiter, a seat at the table on global space-safety norms, and a fully scoped asteroid-belt mission preparing for launch.

In our reading, the more interesting question is no longer whether the UAE can credibly aim for the top ten, but how high within it the country ends up sitting once the industrial base it has been quietly building is fully visible.