Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday said Turkey is starting preparations to send a Turkish citizen to the International Space Station.
"As part of the national space program, Turkey is officially starting the process of sending our citizen to the International Space Station," he said following a cabinet meeting.
In February last year, the head of the Turkish Space Agency, Serdar Hussein Yildirim, said that Ankara is likely to use the Russian Soyuz spacecraft for its cosmonaut's flight, which is scheduled for 2023.
In 2021, Erdogan announced a national space program that includes training cosmonauts and sending the country’s own rocket to the moon. Ankara intends to spend about $6 billion on this project. Legislation for the effort was prepared in the fall of 2016. This is one of the largest and most ambitious projects in modern Turkish history.
