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It's not even the first African-designed and -built satellite, which was NigeriaSat-X. In fact, Nigeria has had a space program for some time, starting in 2001

• _djo_ 9y ago
  Technically speaking, the first African-designed and built satellite, albeit one that never flew, was South Africa's Greensat, which began as a military reconnaissance project in 1985 and was converted to an earth observation satellite in 1993.[0] Beyond that, Stellenbosch University's SUNSAT (designed and built entirely by its students and professors under the SunSpace spinoff) went up in 1999, 18 years ago, and 12 years earlier than NigeriaSat-X.[1] I'm not saying this to score points, only to establish the proper context for why this piece is inaccurate, in that African countries have been sending up indigenous satellites for decades. Basically this is just incredibly lazy reporting. It could've been an interesting story about how Cubesats are enabling space access for scientists, students, and engineers in nations like Ghana which lack the resources of their richer global and even continental neighbours, but instead TechCrunch went for the easy way out. [0]http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/greensat.htm http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/greensat.htm [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUNSAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUNSAT
  • xenophonf 9y ago
    I didn't know about SUNSAT. Thanks for the link!