Rayana Barnawi, a Saudi astronaut and the first Arab Muslim female astronaut to reach space, documented her passage over Mecca in a distinctive scene from inside the International Space Station. Barnawi published through her Twitter account a video clip of the station's passage over Saudi Arabia and seeing the Grand Mosque in Mecca with the naked eye.
The video garnered more than 1.4 million views within hours. The two Saudi astronauts set off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket built by billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX on a flight organized by the American company AxiomSpace.