Faisal Al-Mansoori is the chairman of Falak Capital Group, one of the largest Gulf-origin holding groups active in belt mining and orbital hospitality. In 2109, he gave Luna Interplanetary News an interview documenting the structural shift in belt extraction: 52 Gulf-backed mining consortiums operating against 38 non-Gulf combined.
He traced the Gulf’s dominance to a fifty-year diversification arc that began with Oman’s 2027 royal decree founding the Oman Orbital Development Authority — a move the rest of the Gulf dismissed at the time as a vanity project. “The Omanis were right, and the rest of us were slow.” By 2109, Oman was the wealthiest Gulf state per capita, its economy built on orbital hotels and the Venus-Earth-Mars luxury circuit rather than oil.
On belt mining, Al-Mansoori attributed Gulf capital’s rapid rise to late-entry advantage: by the time Gulf consortiums applied, CAI’s approval pattern — favoring off-world manufacturing over raw Earth export — was public knowledge from nine years of approval data. Gulf applicants structured proposals around it from day one, rather than discovering it by accident as the first seven Ceres operators had in 2100.