With China becoming the third country to land on the moon this weekend, Jonathan Kalan considers the state of space research in Africa, which, as we noted a few years ago, includes a Hollywood twist:
[C]alls are growing from many on the continent – and even the African Union – for the formation of AfriSpace, a pan-African space agency. One of the more vocal proponents is Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, who rather surprisingly, appears to be partly motivated by his dissatisfaction about a project funded by the actor George Clooney. With the money earned from his appearance in commercials for the coffee company Nespresso, Clooney has been funding the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), which he co-founded in 2010, to monitor the military activities of al-Bashir – who is accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. A satellite captures real-time imagery of Sudan, enabling a team of analysts to monitor troop movements, bombings and other aggressive activities by al-Bashir in the disputed border areas between Sudan and newly formed South Sudan. … President al-Bashir has indicated that this eye from above is rather unfair, a one-sided measurement of accountability, and so wants more African satellites up there too.
But Kalan finds that a fully-formed African space agency has some obstacles to overcome:
The expertise required to rival other large space agencies may … be a long way off – at least judging by the way some existing African space organizations present themselves to the world. While researching this story, I found that nearly every national space agency or society website was loaded with incomplete or broken content – some were not even functioning. On one call to Ethiopia’s former Minister of Capacity Building, I received a pre-programmed error message. “The network is fizzing out. Please try again later,” it said. When I finally reached him, he told me “this is a good example for what I told you. Our use of space of technology is not to its full potential.”
The Dish 