Cash raised for Africa’s ‘audacious’ moon mission

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Cape Town - It’s an ambitious plan to send an African spacecraft to the Moon, and in doing so inspire a new generation of scientists. Last week the organisers of the Africa2Moon mission, which hopes to launch a mission to the Moon in a decade, raised R247 000 via crowd funding for the first phase of its multi-year mission. The project is the brainchild of the Foundation for Space Development South Africa, a non-profit Cape Town organisation established in 2009 to advance the country’s awareness of space. The mission’s end goal is putting a craft on the moon, or in orbit around it, to transmit video images from its surface to the classrooms of Africa.

Other scientific goals will be added in due course as the mission progresses.

Jonathan Weltman, the organisation’s chief executive, said the mission was a Bhag – a “big hairy audacious goal”.

“The huge leap is the idea that Africa can drag itself out of its rather dire situation by starting to talk about space exploration, by talking about ambition and exploration.”

Weltman, who studied aeronautical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, said the mission would inspire teachers, pupils and university students to become passionate about science.

In so doing, it aimed to improve the country’s and Africa’s STEM, an acronym that stands for disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The Africa2Moon websites states, for example: “(The) mission is being designed to inspire the youth of Africa to believe that ‘They Can Reach for the Moon’ by reaching for the moon!”

Weltman said the organisers of the mission had purposefully upended how public engagement with space missions work.