Africa will need a skilled workforce if it wants to participate in space, delegates heard at yester-

day’s African Space Leaders roundtable.Sandile Malinga, the chief executive officer of the new South African National Space Agency (SANSA), was among those who advocated for more African space scientists. “Whenever we import technology, we have to im-port the skills to operate that technology. We have to develop skills required,” Malinga said.Tahir Iftene from the Algerian Space Agency agreed, saying human resources play a “central role in Afri-ca’s space programme.”Seidu Mohammed, the director general of Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency, said Nigeria will help to train African space scien-tists.Harry Kaane, the secretary for the Kenyan ministry of higher education, science and technology, said “knowledge and infrastructural development is necessary for the exploitation of space”.

Kenya hopes to be the fifth African country – after Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa - to launch a satellite. According to Kaane, the government has already allocated funding to either “build or pur-chase a satellite”.“We believe we will join the other four countries in space in the next three years,” Kaane said.Satellite data is important for a country like Kenya which is experiencing “cyclic droughts and floods leading to catastrophic food shortages” due to cli-mate change, he noted.Satellite data is also useful to track wildlife move-ment for its tourism sector, he said.

Interested in growing the next generation of space scientists? Undergraduate and postgraduate space education is a focus this morning in meeting room TS 13 at 10 am. Arne Hjalmar Hansen of the Nor-wegian Centre for Space-Related Education and Amandine Denis from Belgium’s University of Liège are among the speakers.

Call for afriCa to develop own skilled workforCe

Africa’s Big 5 usually include lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino. Having the Big 5 of outer space is a new experience. From left: Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin and

Ranganath Navalgund of India’s Space Applications Centre flank NASA administrator Charles Bolden, with Jean-Jacques Dordain, head of the European Space Agency, and Keiji Tachikawa,

head of the Japanese space programme, on the right.

Meet the locals through the public cultural programmeDr Catherine Coleman, NASA astronaut will talk about living in space on 5 Oct at 14:15 at Rustenburg Girls Junior School.

Open Night at the South African Astronomical Observatory 5 October 19:30. Talks and a tour of the the venerable observatory. Free.

Book Reading 6 Oct 10:00am Rustenburg Girls Junior (Suitable for

Ages 8-12). Astronomer and Author, Jeff Bennett will read from his book Max Goes To The Moon. Free.

Forged in the Stars 5 October 20:00, CTICC. Jay O’ Callahan from the US will recount the history of NASA, followed by Gcina Mhlope weaving her African magic into an African story of the cosmos. Entrance Free.World heritage protected by

satellite Thursday 6 October 20:00 CTICC. Dr Mario Hernandez of UNESCO and Professor Heinz Ruther of the University of Cape Town will talk about using satellite and laser technologies to help in the monitoring and preservation of the world’s heritage sites. Free.

Space Art Competition, 4 to 7 October all day. ArtScape Foyer, a short walk from the CTICC.

Exciting times are emerging for Africa. This was the opin-ion of renowned German space scientist Berndt Feuer-

bacher as he opened the 62nd International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town.“I am glad to see that more and more African nations em-brace the benefits space technology can bring to their citi-zens,” said Feuerbacher, president of the International As-tronautical Federation (IAF).Feuerbacher (see left) listed ‘‘successful’’ satellite progress in South Africa and Nigeria and mentioned ‘‘important ini-tiatives’’ in Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Tunisia.“It’s time for an Afronaissance in space science,” Cape Town astronomer Peter Martinez, chairperson of the local organ-ising committee, told more than 2,500 delegates.African problems can benefit from space sciences, said South African trade and industry deputy minister Rob Davies.Naledi Pandor, the South African minister of science and technology, was pleased that the IAC was holding its first congress on African soil.“I sincerely hope it does not take another 62 years before the congress comes back to Africa,” Pandor teased the del-egates.

exCiting tiMes ahead for afriCan spaCe

The United States wants to return to transporting its own astronauts into space by 2015, an official for the

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has said.William Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for NASA, told delegates yesterday that the space giant has invited pri-vate companies to help build the vehicle in question. At present, the Americans have to rely on Russian capsules to carry their crews into space.‘‘We are targeting 2015 to start carrying our astronauts. We

hope by then we would have built our own capsule,” Ger-stenmaier said later.The US has three astronauts orbiting in the International Space Station but hopes to increase the number to six be-fore year-end.* Human spaceflight operations concepts will be discussed at a technical session this morning at 10 am in meeting room TS 07. The meeting is due to include Lin Kupeng from the National University of Defense Technology, in China, and Graham O’Neill from USA Space Operations.

Us plan to go baCk to spaCe flight by 2015

The congress gives you the opportunity to understand what we run and the challenges that we face”- Sandile Malinga

chief executive officer, South African National Space Agency.‘ ’

spaCe travel breeds potential vaCCine

Scientists are working on a potential vaccine against pneumonia after a bacteria experiment accompanied as-

tronauts on the final mission of the American space shuttle.This was no ordinary variety of Salmonella, the food-poi-soning bug, which was cultured on the International Space Station in July. For a start, it had been modified so it would not harm hu-mans.In addition, this was a genetically altered strain that carried a protective antigen against another bacteria, Streptococcus pneumonia, which causes life-threatening illnesses such a meningitis.The unique microgravity of the space station increased the vaccine’s effectiveness, maximising its ability to induce a protective immune response.“Bacteria mutates in space,” William Gerstenmaier, the as-

sociate administrator for NASA, told IAC delegates at the Human Space Endeavours symposium yesterday.The resulting vaccine that has been sent to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval for further testing, he said.‘‘Space allows us to get insight into problems faces by soci-ety,” he said. A case in point: bone density loss after a pro-longed stay in space.“We are trying to understand why bone loss occurs in space. The results of the research will benefit society as the same thing occurs in the elderly,’’ Gerstenmaier said.* Human physiology in space will be the focus of a technical session today at 10 am in meeting room TS 15. The meeting is due to be chaired by Inessa Kozlovskaya of Russia’s Insti-tute for Biomedical Problems and Satoshi Iwase of Japan’s Aichi Medical University.

Life-giving water in the Sudan needs to be mapped by satellites, according to Yahya Hasan Al-Tayeb from the

country’s Remote Sensing Authority.“Sudan lacks proper maps of surface water systems,’’ Al-Tayeb said in the pre-IAC workshop on space for the devel-oping nations.Satellite evidence might also be used to mediate the con-flict among countries dependent on the Nile River, he sug-gested.His paper, Water Harvesting Using Space Technologies, was written in collaboration with Gar Alnabi Ibrahim Mohamed from the survey engineering department at the University of Khartoum. “Every aspect of life depends on water availability,” Al-Tayeb noted.* For more on this issue, please attend plenary five tomor-row, on Monitoring Fresh Water from Space. The event, run-ning from 9 to 10 am in auditorium 2, will have a special focus on Africa.

Monitoring fresh water froM spaCe

High school children from Khayelitsha, a densely-popu-lated shack settlement across the highway from the

airport, were invited to launch cool drink satellites at the Overberg Test Range outside Cape Town last week.It is “easier to launch with balloons so we can limit the dan-ger, especially with a 100 excited children around a rocket,” said Jacques Kleynhans, a South African master’s student in satellite systems engineering.Students and graduates from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) the University of Cape Town, and the prestigious local private high school known as Bishop’s all helped build the CanSats.Kleynhans is based in the department of electrical engineer-ing at CPUT, which launched three CanSats.CanSat works to “develop fast outreach for high schools” and is “a fast way of bringing science to school kids,” said Kleynhans, who is exhibiting at the F’SATI (French-South African Technology Institute) stand.CanSat “is very cheap and it is a way to get an idea of satel-lites through a fast-tracked process,” he said, adding that it costs about 1,000 Rands to make one.He took one month to build a CanSat.‘‘CanSats are ideal as a tool to teach kids about satellites as they contain all the subsystems generally found in real satel-lites but are much simpler, quick to develop and implement, and are affordable,’’ said Francois Visser, chief engineer of the F’SATI Satellite Systems Engineering Programme.* The small satellite programmes at the service of develop-ing countries will take place this morning at 10 am in meet-ing room TS 10. Scheduled speakers include Nelson Jorge Schuch of Brazil and Ronnie Nader of the Ecuadorian Civil-ian Space Agency.Sajjad Ghazanfarinia, a student from Iran, will speak about the fromation of a CanSat community in Iran tomorrow at 10 am in meeting room TS 13, as part of the session On Track: Undergraduate and Postgraduate Space Education.

satellite in a Can The year was exceptional not

only for us but for the whole country,

celebrating 50 years since our

launch into space….We are to continue

generating a 40 percent share of space launches’’-

Vladimir Popovkin, head of Roscosmos,

the Federal Space Agency, Russia

‘

’

beyond 2030: stepping stones

to the fUtUreOnly intense international cooperation will make a

success of dream missons, such as sending humans to Mars or near-earth asteroids.Yesterday, Chris Culbert of NASA sketched the basics: the International Space Station will be the jumping-off point for all future deep-space missions.Yes, the American said, the International Space Station is only in Low Earth Orbit. But there is much that can be developed using it as a jumping-off point. Culbert develops scenarios – detailed descriptions of the possible and the probable, based on principles such as ‘‘robustness’’ and ‘‘affordability.’’Here’s a NASA scenario: the sequence of deep-space missions will start cis-lunar and move on to deep-space habitat at one of the Lagrangian points.In turn, this could be followed by a 28-day robotic mission to a near-earth asteroid, with an exploratory test module sent to an asteroid in order to lay the foundations for possible human habitation later. Such plans require a lot of good science, not to mention advanced propulsion systems, was what delegates at the ninth symposium on Stepping Stones To The Future heard. As for a Moon-next mission, the final decision is still a long way off, but the ‘‘architecture’’ - a very specific space term referring to the components of the mission - is in place.Maria Perino of Thales Alenia Space, Italy, warned of bottlenecks that threaten mission development – especially the ISS cargo re-supply systems after the demise of the Shuttle. She lifted the covers on novel technologies being developed by Thales and their partners: inflatable habitat modules, even an inflatable cargo transporter. George Schmidt of NASA’s Glenn Research Center is working on a human-like or ‘‘quasi-android’’ robotic mission scenario for the exploration of Mars beyond 2030. This would need to be preceded by orbiter missions, perhaps even manned missions to Phobos and Deimos, as the moons of Mars are so small they can be ‘‘docked with’’ rather than ‘‘landed on,’’ he said.The human-like robotic missions, paving the way for real human explorers, will comprise landers and a control ‘‘truck’’ which will carry out wide-ranging exploration across the Martian terrain of up to 100 kilometres or more. * If you’re interested in the future of space exploration, don’t miss the discussion on Human Exploration in Deep Space today at 3 pm in meeting room TS 11. It’s all part of the ninth symposium on visions and strategies for far futures, organised by Giuseppe Reibaldi of the European Space Agency in the Ntherlands and Hans Hoffman of ORBComm in Germany.

Newsletter copy by Research Africa. Design and production by Hippo Communications

NASA administrator Charles Bolden met with underprivileged children at South Peninsula High School in Cape Town prior to the launch of the International Astronautical Congress. He speaks tonight at 8pm at the Cape Town Convention Centre.

Solar power from space could play a leading role in the world’s future energy needs within a few decades, del-

egates at the International Astronautical Congress heard yesterday.John Mankins, president of Artemis Innovation Manage-ment Solutions in the USA, said solar-based solar power plants were economically achievable and appeared feasible in the next 10 to 20 years using the available technology. More information is needed to build confidence among en-gineers and policy makers, he said. The cost of earth to orbit transportation was another factor, and space-based solar power also raised a host of policy and regulatory issues.However, Mankins believed that few developing countries are able to carry out this kind of project.“Not any country in Africa is in a position to do that re-search,” he said.Discussions and actions must now be undertaken to pursue the findings and the recommendations, he said.

power froM spaCe