'An important milestone in a budding space economy': Kenya launches its first-ever operational satellite

Nairobi: Kenya made history on Saturday by launching its first operational satellite with a SpaceX rocket which took off from California, US.

The launch was postponed several times earlier this week due to bad weather.

On Saturday, a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket took off at 06:48 GMT from the base at Vandenberg, California, before deploying several dozen satellites an hour later, including the Kenyan Taifa-1.

Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on Landing Zone 4 pic.twitter.com/6vJQs6EXUa

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 15, 2023

Designed and developed by indigenous researchers, Kenyan Taifa-1 has been created to help the African nation to gauge the extent of an ongoing drought by monitoring and collating data on the agriculture and the environment of Kenya.

In a joint statement last week, the Kenyan Ministry of Defence and the Kenya Space Agency (KSA) touted “an important milestone” that should boost Kenya’s “budding space economy”.

“We have direct benefits from space exploration, we are going to be able to improve our food security,” Pattern Odhiambo, a KSA engineer who participated in the project, told AFP.

He further explained that the satellite will help the government to have access to high-quality earth observation data which will in turn help them to predict crop yield.

Kenya sent its first nano-satellite into space in 2018.

As of 2022, more than 50 African satellites have been sent to space, according to Space in Africa, a Nigerian company that tracks African space programmes.

Egypt was the first country on the continent to send a satellite into space in 1998.

With inputs from agencies

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