Cape Town: A group of teenage girls plan to launch Africa’s first private satellite into orbit. A team of high school girls from Cape Town, South Africa, have designed and built payloads for a satellite that will orbit over the earth’s poles scanning Africa’s surface, the CNN reported. The satellite will collect information on agriculture, and food security within the continent. A total of 14 teenagers are being trained by satellite engineers as apart of a project by South Africa’s Meta Economic Development Organisation (MEDO) and Morehead State University.
Seventeen-year-old Brittany Bull said, “Using the data transmitted, we can try to determine and predict the problems Africa will be facing in the future. “Where our food is growing, where we can plant more trees and vegetation and also how we can monitor remote areas,” she said, adding “We have a lot of forest fires and floods but we don’t always get out there in time.” The satellite is scheduled to launch in May 2017 and if successful it will make MEDO the first private company in Africa to build a satellite and send it into orbit.
“It’s a new field for us [in Africa] but I think with it we would be able to make positive changes to our economy,” said 16-year-old Sesam Mngqengqiswa, who is part of the team. “Discovering space and seeing the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s not something many black Africans have been able to do, or do not get the opportunity to look at,” she said. In half a century of space travel, no black African has journeyed to outer space.
