Nairobi Kenya (Commonwealth Union)_While the world’s agog at the exploits of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, Kenya joined the space race with its first operational satellite being launched into orbit from the Californian skies. The satellite was installed in the SpaceX Falcon9 rocket which took off this week and was designed and developed by a team of Kenyan researchers. Upto 2022, the African continent has had as many as fifty satellites sent to space, while Kenya sent its first nano-satellite into space in 2018. In 1998, Egypt was the first country in the African continent to deploy a satellite into space.
This satellite will provide data for agriculture and environmental monitoring in Kenya, an imperative for the country which is currently experiencing an unprecedented drought. While bad weather plagues most of the African continent including Kenya, it seems that the launch of the rocket carrying the satellite was hampered several times as well, due to bad weather conditions.
When Falcon9 blasted off from the American base of Vandenberg in California, several tens of satellites including the Kenyan Taifa-1 was deployed an hour later into space. Taifa-1 is Swahili for Nation-1 and considered a major milestone for Kenya’s space economy with the country hoping to kill two birds with one stone – gain an international reputation for its space prowess and gather data to improve food security.
The multi-spectral camera in the satellite will deploy quality data gathered from its observations of the earth which will in turn help the country predict crop yield.
