South Africa, a nation with a deep-rooted space heritage, has recognised that space is becoming a vital platform for future growth and diplomacy and is turning to its BRICs allies and the US for collaboration, writes Scott Firsing.

South Africa has a long-standing legacy of space exploration, with roots stretching back nearly 200 years when, in 1841, The University of Cape Town established a Magnetic Observatory as a recording station at the Cape of Good Hope.

Being strategically located at the southern tip of the African continent makes South Africa a valuable location to have a ground station to receive data from satellites in Earth’s orbit and beyond. In 1961, NASA constructed the Hartebeesthoek ground tracking station, located just outside Johannesburg, which played a significant role in supporting NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon during the 1960s. It is still operational today, and currently owned by South Africa’s National Research Foundation. The US also helped South Africa successfully launch its first satellite, Sunsat, into orbit in 1999, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, USA.

The 21st century ushered in remarkable growth in South Africa’s space endeavours, with new collaborations emerging with countries like Russia playing a large role. In 2002, South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth made headlines as he journeyed to the International Space Station (ISS) as a space tourist, aided by Russian technology. Russia then helped South Africa launch its second satellite, SumbandilaSat, from a Russian spaceport in Kazakhstan in 2009.

The South African National Space Agency (SANSA) was established in 2010. Since then, SANSA has helped lead the nation’s rapid space expansion that includes new satellites, space weather expertise and stations, being built in conjunction with partners like the US and Russia.

South Africa’s domestic space capabilities

South Africa has become known for its space weather monitoring capabilities. Since 2010, SANSA has been monitoring the sun and providing space weather forecasts, alerts and environmental data on space weather conditions. In November 2022, and despite many development challenges, South Africa officially opened their new 24/7 Space Weather Centre. The Centre offers a critical service to the African aerospace community, as space weather can cause significant damage to various entities like insecure electricity supplies or satellites in orbit.

South Africa currently has the most satellites in orbit out of any African country at 13. In 2022 three African-designed and built nanosatellites were put into orbit for the first time. The MDASat constellation collects data to enhance the security and protection of South African marine resources by detecting, monitoring and identifying foreign vessels within the country’s economic zone.

South Africa, like most countries, prefers to use domestically made technology when possible. The country is looking to place another locally produced satellite in orbit in 2025 to provide almost continuous real-time remote radar sensing for the whole continent. This will give defence and intelligence services the ability to monitor the region. The satellites will also produce imagery vital for tasks like agricultural or infrastructure monitoring, and disaster management. South Africa wants its own launch capability by the end of the decade, the holy grail for the space industry.

The issue of local ownership recently became an issue when South African born Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starlink became accessible in South Africa. SpaceX’s fleet of low earth orbit satellites has revolutionized high-speed internet around the world and would have enabled South Africans to access the Internet from anywhere in the country for a fee. However, Musk’s team was unable to obtain a license from the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) because any applicant must have 30 per cent ownership from historically disadvantaged groups, something SpaceX was not willing to do.

Rapidly expanding global space partnerships

South Africa, understanding their limited monetary resources and niche areas of expertise, has embarked on numerous bilateral and multilateral space collaborations over recent years.

In 2020, South Africa began partnering with NASA to build a brand-new deep space ground station at Matjiesfontein in the Western Cape. The facility will be key in supporting communications for America’s future human spaceflight Artemis missions to the Moon and Mars. South Africa is the fourth country after the US, Australia and Spain to host a deep space ground station.

Although the US has tried to rekindle the old flames of the NASA-South Africa historical relationship, Pretoria is yet to sign America’s Artemis Accords, a NASA/US State Department document promoting the peaceful exploration of space. No direct reason has been given as to why by the South African government, but experts speculate about South Africa’s opposition to unilateralism or no immediate economic or political benefit. South Africa also has a history of wanting to maintain strategic independence on certain topics. Nevertheless, the non-signature is a worrying sign for Washington as the US watches South Africa move closer to their BRICs partners, particularly in the space arena.

In fact, what South Africa has in fact signed up for is to be one of the countries officially involved in China’s multilateral International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) to be completed on the Moon’s South Pole by 2035, with an extended station by 2045.

South Africa and other members of the BRICS coalition are working closer than ever with China via the BRICS Joint Committee on Space Cooperation, which was first established in 2022. Today the Committee consists of: South Africa, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The US’s infamous Wolf Amendment bars NASA from working directly with China on space-related activities, and the US and the European Space Agency (ESA) have limited involvement with Russia after their invasion of Ukraine.

The exact opposite is happening as far as bilateral South African-Russian space collaboration is concerned. At the May 2024 BRICS Committee meeting the SANSA CEO Humbulani Mudau supported Russia’s proposal to create a BRICS Space Council. SANSA also used the meeting to sign an MoU with the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences to enable closer collaboration in space and technology projects.

These developments come shortly after Russia and South Africa opened a space debris detection facility at the historic Hartbeeshoek facility in July 2023. Russia also requested a future Russian ground station similar to NASA’s. Moscow has even offered to take South Africans to space and have requested South Africa’s involvement in the Russian Orbital Service Station scheduled to launch into space in 2027 and to be completed in 2032. NASA only plans to operate the ISS through 2030, and is looking towards future American, commercially owned and operated platforms.

It is tough to argue that South Africa’s growing list of space initiatives isn’t exciting, especially for a country wanting to grow its economy and push its youthful population to study advanced technological subjects. However, because of the growth of space’s importance in areas like defence and national security, global science and technological cooperation is and will increasingly become a touchy subject for many countries. Even though NASA sees enthusiasm for collaboration, other American government agencies see South Africa’s relations with its partners like Russia and China as shrouded in geopolitical and security concerns. South Africa, with their already established space capabilities and strategic location for space operations, will have to do their best to balance this.

Photo credit: Martin Heigan used with permission CC BY-NC-ND 2.0