Oman’s dream for a spaceport sits in a swath of desert overlooking the Arabian Sea. If all goes according to plan, three separate complexes here will launch everything from small suborbital rockets for scientific experiments to superheavy behemoths into space, bringing payloads of satellites to the stars. There will be a large mission-control building, warehouses for rocket assembly and testing, and a business park. If the spaceport succeeds, by 2027 Oman will join the small number of countries — just a dozen to date — that possess the facilities to launch objects into space.

But on a scorching afternoon this past April, the site was just an unpaved road, three large tents flapping in a heavy wind, and a few temporary buildings in the distance. The tents served as a makeshift visitors’ center for the spaceport’s first ever on-site public event.

Julanda Al-Riyami, the chief commercial officer at Etlaq, the company behind the spaceport, seemed tense. The event, called the Etlaq Fan Experience, was set to culminate the next morning with a rocket launch. The high winds were a bad omen.

The launch would be just the second in Etlaq’s short history. Approximately 50 people had gathered inside the tents, where boys in dishdashas and girls in white hijabs clustered around a robot exhibit and sat in the darkness of an inflatable cosmos. Bedouin women from a nearby village looked on. Al-Riyami, tall and intense, chatted with rocket engineers, coordinated booth space with sponsors, and fretted over pallets of water bottles. A successful launch, he said, requires attention to the smallest of details. “It’s not very often that in the middle of the desert you have an event like this,” Al-Riyami told Rest of World. “What we want to start is this heritage, or let’s say a culture, of watching rocket launches.”