Mr Samra is on a mission to confront the final frontier and go to space.  If he completes the mission, he will be the first Egyptian and the youngest Arab to go beyond the mesosphere.

 

“One of my earliest ambitions was to be an astronaut,” he says. “I was always very curious as a child and from a young age I read about explorers.”

 

It would take a while before Mr Samra would begin to explore the world beyond the family holidays taken in London and Paris and the North Coast of Egypt.

 

He enrolled onto an economics degree at the American University of Cairo and upon completion landed a job with an investment bank in London. A three-month secondment in Hong Kong granted him the opportunity to explore a different country and culture and from there, he began frequent travels to places unexplored.

 

In 2007, at the age of 28, he fulfilled his childhood ambition of climbing Mount Everest, making the first Egyptian to do so. From there he went onto climb the world’s seven summits Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Denali in Alaska .

 

His passion for exploration led him to set up a travel and adventure company to encourage more people from the region to discover new places and cultures.

 

When not travelling, he serves as chairman of Marwa Fayed’s Toy Run, a charity started by his late wife. Marwa had begun the initiative before meeting Mr Samra, collecting toys from family and friends to donate to orphanages in Cairo.

 

“When we met she spoke very fondly about it, but we never had a chance to work on it together,” he says.

 

Soon after her passing, on the first day of Ramadan in 2013, Mr Samra set himself the target of collecting 500 toys.

 

“I was looking for something to do, just one toy run, that basically started growing very, very fast in a way I never expected,” he says.

 

The charity secured a grant from MBC and won the media company’s humanitarian project of the year. There are now eight chapters across the world that operates on a volunteer basis. To date, more than 100,000 toys have been collected and handed out to children.

 

Being charitable runs in the family. His mother set up Egypt’s first private mental health charity for children with mental disabilities. Growing up, Mr Samra would partake in activities and today he sits on the board while continuing to raise funds and awareness through his climbs.

 

While still much left to explore on earth, Mr Samra is focusing most of his energy on space. To date, only 400 people have gone to space of which only two were Arabs – one a Saudi Arabian prince, the other a Syrian-American businessman.

 

Going to space is not easy, particularly when your country does not have a space programme.

 

“When I started doing my MBA in 2005, Richard Branson came and spoke about Virgin Galactic and taking regular people to space,” he says.

 

A competition was launched to find someone to send to space. The months-long process, which saw 2 million applicants, was whittled down to 110 finalists who were put through ten days of intensive tests and challenges. Mr Samra was the applicant who won.

 

But the process has not been easy. Space travel is enormously expensive and the programme has faced a few challenges that has delayed his launch to orbit.

 

“I decided to do something about it rather than just wait,” he says.

 

He has managed to land a place on project PoSSUM (polar suborbital science in the upper mesosphere), a 15-person group partly funded by NASA to study rare cloud formations to determine the effects of climate change. He is the only person on the team from a non-science background.

 

He has also been accepted onto Project PHEnOM (physical, health and environmental observations in microgravity), which aims to develop new solutions to explore space and the oceans. He is now studying space science to make himself more useful to the teams he is now a part of.

 

For Mr Samra, there is a sense of putting the region on the map through this endeavour.

 

“How can you be an asset in space? Why would a group spend all this money, are you able to conduct certain research that is unique?” he says. “For me now, it is trying to come up with unique angle and developing a CV for myself as the Arab world starts to get more interested in space.”

 

The UAE recently founded a space agency and has plans to orbit mars in 10-15 years.

 

“There will be a very small pool of people in the region that have expertise in this area,” he says. “My aim is to be one of those people.”