In 2024, the UAE will open the world’s largest Mars simulation, a complex of interlocking geodesic domes that will replicate the environmental conditions of the planet Mars in the desert outside of Dubai. Last year, after a successful multinational “Mars mission” in the Dhofar desert, the Omani government announced plans to build a permanent space research center devoted to analog missions to the Moon and Mars. Why are these countries developing space programs focused on the future exploration and settlement of Mars? How do simulations and analogs in these desert environments allow us to better understand and experience otherworldly places? What new national and planetary imaginaries are taking shape in these desert spaces? This paper addresses these questions by tracing the genealogy of the UAE and Oman projects through publicity materials, interviews, and their press coverage in the Middle East. Building on recent work by anthropologists (Aima 2018; Günel 2019), geographers (Koch 2021), and political scientists (Grove 2021) on emerging desert ecologies in the Gulf related to space exploration, I examine the way these projects transform the desert into technoscientific frontiers that trouble the distinction between nature and culture, past and future, and colonizer and colonized. Ultimately, I argue that a distinctive feature of these projects is their appeal to an ecological utopianism rooted in an Islamic vision of the future that simultaneously reproduces and challenges western tropes of the desert.