Nigeria successfully launched into orbit two new satellites in the United Kingdom recently, and so far their image resolution has been very impressive. EMEKA ANUFORO was there at the launch, where he spoke with the Chairman of Survey Space Technology (SSTL), Martin Sweeting who enumerated the various ways space technology can be used to solve Africa's socio-economic problems. Excerpts:WHY should Africa go into space when it has so many problems to solve'First of all, we should look at space in general, and why it is applicable to Africa as well. One of the big advantages of space is that essentially you are looking down at the earth from a very vantage point. So, it is a question, really, of looking at what is happening, not just in some areas, but sort of thematically across areas. Space gives us this kind of unique vantage point for monitoring things like climate change, agriculture, security, and so on.I think, if you look over the last 40 years, the use of space has become more affordable. That means that a wide number of countries can afford to get into space and take advantage of this vantage point. They can then start looking at their own particular needs.In the 60s, 70s, it was partly the preserve of the super powers. Now it is much more affordable so anybody can go into it. You can compare this to computers in the 60s when they were only found in government buildings, now everybody has more power on the mobile phones and you have a PC on every desk.So space gives you this unique capability to look at space from high vantage position.Why Africa' The question is why not'The sort of problems that we face in terms of climate, environment, food security, water security, urban development, and all these sort of issues affect everybody and they are not limited by borders. The problems that Africa has are a little bit different from the problems, say Europe or America has. Nevertheless, those problems can be better addressed if you have better information, picture or view from space. It is not only to solve these things, but it adds a very important dimension. This has been realised by the economically developed countries for quite a long time, initially for security, but increasingly for environment. In environment, you include agriculture. Africa has the same problems. You have desertification. You have either too much water or too little water. You have locust plaques; you want to be able to make better use of the arable land, to plan urban development and what effect that has on biodiversity. Many of the problems are common, but you have some very specific ones.How can the continent solve its problems from space'African can use space to solve its problems in the same way as many other countries that are using space. For example, one of the easiest things for people to relate with is agriculture, water resources, and urban development. From space, we can have a look at wide regions; we can look at health, crops, looking down at the field levels, have a look at a particular field, look across the field and see how the crops are like.If you look at it from space, you can plot out which parts of the field need fertiliser and which doesn't. You can then use GPS, you can type this into your map, and you can have a tractor with which you can put the right amount of fertiliser in a particular field. That does two things:It saves the farmer money, because he is not going to spend unnecessarily on fertiliser, but it also means that you don't pollute the land with too much nitrite. You are saving money and saving your land from pollution. That is a very tiny example.If you look at say, urban development, and this is something peculiar with Africa and other very rapidly developing countries, if you have an unconstrained urban growth, the impact on the biodiversity may not be apparent for a while, but as time goes on, you find that it has significant impact on water causes, how you deal with floods, on vegetation and so forth. By monitoring this as the urban areas grow, you can then plan better, and also if you start to see such consequences, you can then react to them. It is quite difficult seeing this from the ground. Of course, what you have to do is to have an aerial view of these so often. If you are looking at crops, you want to do it every few days, if you are looking at urban development; you want to do it every few months, maybe sixth months. For deforestation, you want to check how many forests are being cut down; you want to do this every other month. And then you compare pictures upon pictures to see the bits that are being affected. These are the sorts of things, which are of particular importance.In Nigeria, for example, the satellite images could be used to crosscheck the population census. It is possible for example, to count the number of people individually, but you can see the size of the villages from space. If you have a village of such a size, you know that it has roughly 50 people, if you got one of this size, you got 200 people in it. So, you can do a quick estimate of pollution from this and if it comes up with a 100 million and the line census comes up with 50 million, and then you know that actually something is not right here. It is going to be very precise, but it gives you independent crosscheck to make sure that the other data is reasonable.And of course, if you look at things like deforestation, carbon monitoring, carbon accounting and carbon trading, the whole carbon issue is going to be very important in the future and individual countries are going to be asked to reduce their carbon emissions and plant trees and so on. So you are going to need to be able to make an assessment of what the tree content is: whether it is going up or down and when other countries say you should be producing more or less you can say, you have your own data and you can argue back. So, these are some of the reasons why actually, it is very important for Africa to have access to these data.What is the capacity of some of these African countries to analysis data from satellites'Of course, it varies widely across Africa. If you are looking at South Africa, which has a long history in space, they have quite a well developed data analysis capacity, because in the end, the data that comes from satellite is not the issue, it is the information that you derive from the data that is useful.Getting the pictures, yes, great, but really using them you have to acquire the complex chain to analyse, to provide the knowledge, which you can give to the farmers, the urban planners, or who ever.In South Africa, because of their long history for example, they have quite a well-developed chain. If you then look in the northern countries in Africa: Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, they have varying degree. Algeria has a reasonably advanced capability, Morocco, reasonably. Tunisia has some. I don't have this in details, but I know they have a data centre, Egypt likewise.If you come to the sub-Sahara, Nigeria has started on this programme and has built a space agency. Emphasis has been quite heavy on communications, which is not unreasonable, and the ability to build up the data analysis training and observation has been happening over the last 4-5 years. They are building up.South Africa has been there for a long time. Some of the northern countries have been there for more than 10 years, sub-Saharan Africa is just starting and Nigeria has been doing this for five years. If you look at the commitment, in numbers, Nigeria has been one of the most active in Africa, certainly in the last 5-6 years in terms of setting up a space agency and pursuing space programmes. Outside Nigeria, in the sub-Sahara Africa ' Kenya, Malawi and so on, are beginning to think about it. They have quite some way to go really, quite some way to go.Part of the activities that we do here, and Nigeria is a very good example, is not just such to provide the space access but to build up the capability inside the country, first of all to be able to do that data analysis, secondly, to be able to participate in space technology. This is a long time programme. It is not for a few years.Don't you think that Africa should learn to build its own satellites, instead of buying them 'off the shelf''If you understand the technology and you want to be able to have a continuing space programme, you need to be able to be an informed customer. So if you go out and buy a satellite, even if in the first place, you should have produced it in the country, you go to China to buy satellite, you go to UK to buy satellite, you need to understand what is required. That is the first thing. As that nucleus grows, then what you want to do is for future satellites, to be able to build initially part of them, and maybe in due course, parts of the satellite, in-country.And the reason you want to do that is that you want to develop the economy of that country and you want to be able to provide challenging and attractive jobs, hi- technology jobs for the people of the country. Space is very inspiring and people like that. But if you have an active space technology, it will spin over to other technologies: it will apply to banking, pharmaceuticals, to agriculture and so on. You provide the aspiration for young people to strive for a high technology career. They may strive towards space, but they may actually branch off into pharmaceuticals or whatever, and so this way you just create wealth for the people.Apart from the individual countries, does Africa as a continent really need a space agency'There have been talks about producing an African space agency, and this is my personal view, I do not see it benefiting a lot. We have a space agency in Europe, the European Space Agency, but we also have national space agencies. The European Space Agency allows us to undertake large projects that an individual country cannot afford, but it is an expensive club to join. But if you have an African space agency at this point, I am not sure I see the real reason for it, maybe in 20-25 years time.If the economies have developed so much that African nations want to play more role in space exploitation, it is what such does, looking at projects beyond single nations. That is a future for Africa, but I don't think that having an African space agency at this time is a good thing. I think each country needs to develop its own capabilities, its own interest, maybe having a coordination council, maybe a body where everybody gets together to talk about what they are doing and then maybe you have bilateral and multilateral collaborations where you can bring resources together, might work. But a formal African space agency, I think it will generate an expensive overhead and that might be quite difficult.What advice have you for individual African countries on space technological development'Individual countries need to educate young people in science and technology and some of those can provide the nucleus for developing the space capability. They need to then get some experience from outside, and then they need to build some capabilities. But the government has a very important role. The government needs to provide a long-term plan and commitment. You can't do this for five years and then say what next' You need to say we have a 25-year plan, and we are going to train people; we are going to start off with our first small satellite to get some experience, we need to build up some capabilities, plan bigger satellites, working in collaboration, we build up an agency, which is providing communication, earth observation, and so on, so that young people can look at this and say, if I follow this I have some career for my entire life, not just for five years I go out and find some other job.If I look at programmes that have been very successful, and Nigeria is a very good example. There are a couple of other countries where there have not been this commitment. People have come in, gottrained, they got a satellite and then government doesn't have long-term plans and the people drift away because they don't see any career. This is happening in the Far East and it is happening in South America. Nigeria and Algeria are good examples of where governments have made long-term plans. Young people are committed to this in these countries because they see a career path.Government has a role to play in setting a long term strategy and commitment, and then you need to train the young people; you need to have schools, universities, and so on.What was your experience with the Nigerian engineers and technicians who built the NigeriaSat-X'We had, I think, roughly 25 on this round. Somebody came and did some academic trainings as well as working on the satellite handsome. It was a very successful project because if you look at the result that has been achieved from some of the satellite in the orbit, it has been very remarkable.The way it worked was that the satellite was designed; it was one that we had used before. We made some enhancements to it, and then the Nigerian engineers worked on that. Essentially, it was their responsibility to build, test and get ready for launch. What SSTL engineers did was to observe, watch and sort of guide them and advise them on how to do it and make sure that things were done right. But the Nigerian engineers did it all themselves. In this way, they actually had a first hand experience on how to build, assembly, test, get for launch, put it on the rocket and afterwards operate it from orbit.The next step is for those engineers to say right we got that experience, on the next satellite, lets make some changes, lets make a new computer, which we can design, let's not change everything, but lets put one or two things that we will be able to do and sit down and work on a new computer, a new communication system, and gradually get an experience of the designing process and sort of build that out. But the experience we had was all good. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We have an excellent satellite in the orbit and it has produced really excellent images.Beyond the pride of going to space and some of these associated benefits, to what level can space activity be treated as commercial venture'Space has the potential to be a commercial business. Not all your space activities are that way because sometimes they are government-based. But part of the goals should be a thriving commercial space activity so it doesn't just depend on government or public funding. The images from NigeriaSat-1 have been sold and some of those revenues go back to the space agency. Now, in terms of the total investment that has been made and the funds that come back from those data sales, it doesn't balance that investment because you are setting up all the facilities and so on. But as you build up space capability and that has to be funded by government. Once you build that up, you can then start to run commercial missions. There is no reason why space cannot be commercial in terms of providing communications and earth observations. It is not an immediate thing. You have got to invest, build up the capability and then gradually commercialise.But in the long term, it should be seen as commercially viable activity.
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