This is a first for the economic engine of East Africa. Kenya will launch an operational satellite into space in the United States on April 10 with the American company SpaceX, the Kenyan Ministry of Defense and the Kenyan Space Agency announced on Monday. This satellite “will provide precise and regular satellite data” which will be useful in particular in the “areas of agriculture and food security, management of natural resources and disasters and monitoring of the environment”, according to the communicated.
Kenya is hit by a historic drought, after several failed rainy seasons. The satellite, Taifa-1 (“Nation-1” in Swahili), “was designed and developed by a team of Kenyan researchers,” the statement continued.
Emerging space economy
This launch, from the US base in Vandenberg, California, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is “an important milestone for Kenya’s space program and should contribute significantly to stimulating the growth of satellite development, data analysis and processing and application development capabilities of Kenya’s nascent space economy,” said the Ministry of Defense and the Kenya Space Agency.
In 2018, Kenya sent its first nano satellite. By 2022, at least 13 African countries had manufactured 48 satellites, according to Space in Africa, a Nigerian company that tracks African space programs. Egypt was the first country on the continent to send a satellite into space, in 1998.