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What a Difference a Decade Makes
A decade ago, the idea of an African space agency might be met with
disbelief, even laughter. A continent characterized by famine and
tinhorn dictators and ethnic slaughter certainly could not send a rocket
into space.
That same attitude toward Africa tends to dominate even today. But
the reality of Africa is diverging significantly from the old tropes.
Today, eight African countries have space agencies,
space centers or mission control facilities. Several others, including
Uganda and Ghana, are in the process of launching theirs. Megascience
projects are sprouting up from the Cape of Good Hope to the Gold Coast.
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As
Paul Quirke notes in
Consultancy Africa,
there has even been extensive discussions regarding the creation of a
cross-national African Space Agency, one which “will liberate Africa
from the technological domination of the West,” according to Sudan’s
president,
Omar al-Bashiri.
What explains this shift? According to African scientists, the
increase of the speed and affordability of computing power, advances in
manufacturing, youth, focus on the achievable and a grim determination
on the part of African governments to invest in a scientific future have
turned the continent and aimed it straight at the future.
Money, cables and focus
Currently the continent’s largest economy, South Africa has increased
its spending on space sciences to €127.4 million, according to
Professor
Nithaya Chetty, group executive for South
Africa’s National Research Foundation. In Africa as a whole, he
estimates current spending at € 153.8 million. Africa writer
G.P. Zacharay estimates South Africa spends 64% of all space research funds in the continent.
“What is certain is that there is significantly more expenditure on
space science and technology in Africa than there was 10 years ago,”
said
Dr. Peter Martinez, Chairman of the South African
Council for Space Affairs and head of the Space Science and Technology
Division of the South Africa Astronomical Observatory. “What has
changed is that there is a greater appreciation among Africa’s political
leadership of the important role of space science and technology as a
motor of socioeconomic development.
Knowing where to focus that money can make the difference between
becoming a world player and staying in the scientific shadows. Southern
Africa in particular is well positioned for astronomy and that has
become its focus, both in optical and especially radio astronomy.
“Southern Africa has a geographic advantage in astronomy because of
direct sight into the Milky Way,” Chetty said. “but also because we have
huge tracks of virgin territory with radio quiet zones and optically
clear skies.” This, according to Martinez “attracted considerable
investments from countries of the North in astronomy facilities in
Africa, particularly southern Africa, which now hosts some of the
premier ground-based astronomy facilities in the world, making it an
attractive destination for scientists to work.”
It’s this focus that has made the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) particularly suitable for South Africa.
When the 1.5 billion Euro SKA is finished, it will be the single largest scientific structure in the world, dwarfing CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
When construction is completely finished and the structure is
operational, it will create a radio telescope array made of 3,000
individual radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia, covering a
total of five square kilometers.
The advent of high speed computing and networking and fibre optical
cable knitting together the continent has also made space science
projects, large and small, practical in a way they were not before. The
continent is surrounded by undersea high speed cabling that has tied it
firmly into the world’s information economy.
And the SKA is simply the largest and most dramatic example of
African astronomy facilities and programs. An African very-long-baseline
inferometry (VLBI) satellite network is currently being built across
the country; the High Energy Stereoscopic System
(H.E.S.S.) gamma ray telescope is operational in Namibia (below); the
largest radio telescope in the world, the MeerKAT, is under construction
in South Africa and the fifth largest optical telescope in the world,
the South African Large Telescope (SALT) is located in the Northern Cape
Province.
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Training and entrepreneurship
“African governments,” Chetty believes, “are finally coming around to
understand the critical importance of science as an instrument for
development. Training in astronomy, and training in computing and
engineering leads to skills that are very wide ranging and are
transferable to other disciplines and even in endeavors far removed from
academia; for example in commerce and industry. This will become the
basis for training a new generation of technicians and artisans.”
Yussif Abdulmumin, the national point of contact for Ghana’s Space Generation Advisory Council (GSAC), agrees.
“Effective space partnering has taken a strong hold in Africa,
especially in Ghana,” he told us. “Although Ghana has not long
experience in space-related events and does not have a major presence on
the global space stage, its socio-economic advancement and
sustainability depends largely on the use of space technologies,
applications and services.”
Ghana’s government has established the Ghana Space Science and
Technology Centre (GSSTC) which is both a center of development and
teaching but also seeks to overtly leverage “commercial application of
space science research for the economic transformation of Ghana.”
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Over 50% of Africa’s population is under 30 years of age. The
enthusiasms of that group in Ghana have powered a deep concern for space
and what knowledge of space means to those on Earth. To educate and
practically guide those whose enthusiasm for space is fueling the
current interest could be the make-or-break in whether that interest has
a developmental potential for the country and the West African region.
Justin Jonas, director of SKA South Africa said his
project is a tool to develop the talents and knowledge of African
scientists in a public sphere and is deeply interwoven with a “human
capital development program.”
“SKA’s going to be the biggest thing around,” Jonas said. “One of the
first thing we set up was over 400 grants in five or six years.” The
grants have allowed, and will continue to allow, graduate students to
get hands-on experience designing, building, maintaining and utilizing
the SKA. A quarter of students South Africa has hosted on the project so
far have been from within Africa but from outside South Africa itself.
“Over time, a good proportion of those students will power the
economies of South Africa and other countries” in Africa, he said. They
will start their own companies, run others and govern their countries’
policies, because they will have demonstrable proof of excellence and
experience at the very top level of practical science and engineering.
“The bottom line is, African governments are finally beginning to listen to the scientists,” said Chetty. So is business.
Afronauts Assemble!
But when are we going to see an African astronaut fly to the moon in
an African rocket ship? This is a question we asked practically everyone
we talked to because, well, some of us watched men walk on the moon on
grainy televisions in primary school classrooms.
For one thing, there have been Africans in space, technically. Three of them so far. However, the two who were astronauts—
Phillippe Perrin born in Morocco and
Patrick Baudry,
born in Cameroon—were born to parents from outside Africa, joined the
French Air Force and do not live in Africa; and the other, South
African
Mark Shuttlesworth, was a space tourist.
But Africans aboard an African space vehicle leaving Earth? For
Africa, Chetty explained, astronomy, not manned exploration, is the key
to space.
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“Space programs in Africa are not focused on getting men in space,”
he said. “Telescopes-on-the ground is very achievable and we can produce
world class science from them. In terms of development, astronomy
catches the imagination of everyone, children to old folks; it brings
cultures together. Is there a culture on the planet that has not looked
up into the sky and wondered? astronomy has become a sort of brain gain,
and a way to develop a number of peripheral activities which other
sciences don’t have the ability to do.”
In the past, Southern Africa has been a place for Europeans to come
to look at the sky, make their observations and hie it on back to their
home countries and their own universities, in essence, taking their
science with them, a practice Chetty calls “extractive science,” is
being supplanted by a more independent and then cooperative model.
“There has been little endemic development of the science,” in Africa
until now. “Now, we’re paying a lot of attention to producing an
environment where science will develop, building up our universities.
For me, that’s the dream: international scientists come to collaborate
because we’re doing world class science. Extractive science,
neo-colonial science, that’s not going to happen on our watch.”
Yeah! Definitely
Chris Nsamba, the founder of the private Africa Space Research Program (ASRP) in Uganda, however, disagrees.
“Yeah! Definitely“ there will in time be an African astronaut reaching space in an African rocket.
The ASRP plans to launch a satellite from a Ugandan-built rocket next
year. He said a successful test of the booster rocket was completed in
2011. His $45 million project is primarily funded by wealthy donors,
though Nsamba said the Ugandan government has pledged some funds. Its
facilities are on land owned and provided to the project by one of the
funders.
Theirs will not be the first Africa-launched, African-built
satellite. South Africa and Nigeria have both launched their own, with
the latter making clear their intent to put a man in space by 2015.
Other countries have also launched satellites purchased from others and
still more have had other countries launch satellites from and for them.
What makes the program unique is its bootstrapping, a kind of
do-it-yourself approach known in Kiswahili as “jua kali.” But do not
mistake do-it-yourself for amateurish.
Perhaps it’s fitting that Uganda is so ambitious. After all, NASA’s first African-American flight director is
Kwatsi Alibaruho, a Ugandan national.
The tug between entrepreneurs and governments can get very
enthusiastic in Africa. Often whether you are government-funded may
depend as much on your political connection to those in power as on the
scientific, or economic merit, of your project. Some may consider the
ASRP project to be putting the cart before the horse. Unlike the
programming of a mobile money application, satellite launches are
extremely resource and infrastructure-intensive.
But Nsamba and his crew are independent-minded.
“I tell my boys, it’s our planet,” he said. “it’s like we’re all in
the same vehicle, a big bus. If you’re in America, Asia, Europe, we’re
all in the same bus; if our bus has a problem we’re all concerned. If
all countries are doing homework for Africa, it means Africa is lazy.
Now, we are being responsible”
Africa has a two-century long history of engagement with scientific
astronomy, Chetty noted. It also has a longer history of naked-eye human
observation of the heavens out of any place on the planet.
It seems like a reasonable foundation to build on.
