Kenya will launch its first operational satellite in the United States on April 10 with the American company SpaceX, the Kenyan Ministry of Defense and the Kenyan space agency announced the 3rd April.
This satellite “will provide accurate and regular satellite data” that will be useful in particular in the “areas of agriculture and food security, natural resource and disaster management and environmental monitoring,” according to the statement.
Kenya, the economic powerhouse of East Africa, is affected by a historic drought, after several rainy seasons failed. The satellite, Taifa-1 (“Nation-1” in Swahili), “was designed and developed by a team of Kenyan researchers,” the statement continued.
The launch, from the U.S. Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is “a significant milestone for Kenya’s space program and is expected to contribute significantly to driving the growth of satellite development, data analysis and processing, and application development capabilities of Kenya’s nascent space economy”, the Ministry of Defense and Kenya’s space agency boast.
In 2018, Kenya sent its first nano-satellite. By 2022, at least 13 African countries had made 48 satellites, according to Space in Africa, a Nigerian company that tracks African space programs. Egypt was the first country on the continent to send a satellite into space, in 1998.