Moving at the speed of the average runner, at just more than 500km above the surface of the South Atlantic far off Cape Town, are three dainty little boxes that signal an immense opportunity for the poorest continent.
Launched into orbit in January 2022 from Cape Canaveral, the trio are the first of nine maritime domain awareness (MDA) satellites tracking shipping on one of the world’s most heavily trafficked sea-routes, around the Cape of Good Hope.
The nine mini-satellites will form the first constellation of all-African designed and built satellites, the leading edge of a burgeoning African space science industry directly linked to the security of Africa’s blue economy. US think-tank Brookings notes that the sector currently generates $300bn annually.
The continent now has 318 private space technology outfits operating in 28 countries, the leaders already topping $5m a year in profit, said Tsehaie Woldai, a visiting professor of geosciences at Wits University.
Woldai projected that the sector would employ more than 100,000 people by 2026. In a groundbreaking 2019 study, he numbered 53 national space-related agencies and more than 90 African academic institutions offering space science qualifications.
For instance, SA’s MDA microsatellites are the product of a graduate school of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), which has been a seedbed of further private initiatives, such as that of its former satellite programme chief Dr Robert van Zyl.
He told Business Day that three years ago, he started AAC Space Africa, the SA branch of Scottish company AAC Clyde Space, which specialises in space data derived from earth-observation microsatellites about the size of a rugby-ball with their solar panels folded.
Another new player on the scene is the Durban-based Aerospace Systems Research Institute (ASRI), which has built a suborbital prototype of a planned series of rockets, and have successfully test-fired the first engine design for a nine-engined, two-stage orbital commercial launch vehicle that will be designed, ASRI engineer Tyrone Swanepoel said, to deliver a 200kg satellite to a 500km sun-synchronous orbit.
Not all applications are civilian: in 2023, the SA Air Force began establishing a Space Command Section as SA’s need for situational awareness of its immense oceans has never been greater; the MDA trio are equipped with short- and long-range automatic identification systems which name and track shipping.
Low crude prices since 2016 and a rise in Suez Canal passage fees to the Egyptian authorities has seen maritime traffic around the Cape increase in recent years — a gain in about $30bn a year of cargo. Meanwhile, 17 international airlines traverse this huge swathe of the South Atlantic.
If SA succeeds in its claim before the UN to expand its exclusive economic zone, its ocean holdings will be double the size of the country, and will, predicted former environmental affairs minister Edna Molewa, create 1-million jobs and add $10bn to the country’s GDP by 2033.
But already, its international commitments to maritime and aeronautical search-and-rescue involve an area of responsibility among the world’s largest, encompassing 28.5-million square kilometres, down to the South Pole, and including possessions of Britain, Norway and Australia.
Maritime monitoring also includes the need to counter illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, as well as piracy off the east coast, and increasingly, in the Gulf of Guinea off Nigeria in the West. Nigeria operates a communications and an earth-observation satellite. The latter is used for land observations only, however, and is well past its 2018 operational expiry date.
Yet Nigeria has budgeted for a replacement, being one of only four African countries alongside SA, Algeria and Egypt that has the engineering capacity to build its own satellites. Nigeria and Gabon have one ground receiving station each, while Algeria, Egypt, Kenya and SA each have two receiving and tracking stations.
But another tracking station is being prepared in the Karoo: a $178m Deep Space Complex on a farm outside the Western Cape dorp of Maitjiesfontein that would assist, among others, Nasa in its crewed Artemis moon landing.
Emilia Mosima, spokesperson for the Hermanus-based SA National Space Agency (Sansa), which was established in 2011 and which this June hosted an inaugural forum for heads of African space agencies, told Business Day that work was well under way at the farm: “We have done the geotechnical study, cleared and stabilised the site, and access roads have been built.”
She said the complex would be operated by Sansa’s Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory west of Pretoria, which provided assistance to the first moon landing in July 1969, and its work would focus on beyond-orbital programmes from 36,000km to 2-million kilometres out, starting with Nasa’s Artemis moonshots.
For Artemis, Matjiesfontein will provide communications and navigation services and redundancies as one of three ground stations, the others being in the US and Australia. Artemis has already orbited an uncrewed module around the moon in 2022, and is scheduled to do a crewed orbit no earlier than September 2025.
Mosima said that Matjiesfontein would not be ready for that shot as construction would still be under way, but was scheduled to be online for the most critical stage: the actual moon-landing, inked in for September 2026. “We’re really chasing the US schedule,” she said.
Meanwhile, Etim Offiong, chief science officer at Nigeria’s African Regional Centre for Space Science & Technology Education, warned that the AU’s “African outer space programme,” was the most neglected of its Agenda 2063 flagship projects.
But 2023’s African Space Industry Annual Report, the fifth and latest produced by the private sector African Space consultancy, predicts that within three years, the industry will grow to $22.64bn, adding 105 African satellites to the 58 launched, and doubling to six its launch sites.
African Space’s budgetary projections published in June state: “African countries have earmarked $465.34m for their space programmes in 2024. This figure represents a significant 27.86% reduction from the revised 2023 allocation of $643.13m. The total includes statutory allocations to national space programmes and, for the first time, contributions from the AU to support its newly established African Space Agency.”
The primary cause of the decline in 2024 was due, the consultancy said, to local currency devaluations. But the overall trend was expansive: “Between 2018 and 2024, African governments have allocated over $3.1bn for space programmes.”
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