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SpaceX To Launch The Arab World’s Most Advanced Satellite In 2023
The launch of the MBZ-SAT is part of the UAE’s broader space ambitions, including plans to have a human colony on Mars by 2117.
Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), the government organization working on the UAE space program, has announced that it will use the SpaceX rideshare program to launch the MBZ-SAT satellite into space in 2023.
SpaceX established its rideshare program two years ago as a low-cost alternative to traditional white-glove launch services. Since then, over 200 satellites have been launched thanks to the program, which is aimed at small satellites like the 700 kg MBZ-SAT satellite, whose weight and size make it a great fit for the 24-inch ESPA class port, which has a maximum capacity of 830 kg.
MBRSC
Once successfully deployed, the MBZ-SAT will become the Arab world’s most powerful Earth-imaging satellite, significantly outperforming the KhalifaSat, the first Emirati-built satellite, by offering nearly twice the resolving power and featuring multiple other improvements to take clear images from around 500 km above the surface of the Earth.
Most components for the satellite were developed domestically in partnership with UAE-based companies, including Mubadala-owned Strata, Falcon Group, Edge Group’s EPI, Halcon, and Rockford Xellerix. There’s still quite a bit of work left to do before the MBZ-SAT can take off for space, however, which is why the satellite won’t launch any sooner than in 2023.
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“MBRSC team completed the structure model and initial tests of MBZ-SAT along with the completion of the engineering and Flatsat qualification module,” the organization tweeted. “The team will now begin preparations to manufacture the flight model”.
The launch of the MBZ-SAT is part of UAE’s broader space ambitions, including a plan to have a human colony on Mars by 2117 and participation in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. To become a major player in the space race, UAE must support local companies and inspire young people to pursue careers in the space industry.
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UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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