Today’s Business Day ran a portion of my National Space Strategy story, with the rest being sacrificed at the altar of limited space. The most useful aspect of a blog is that you can always win the newspaper-space-constraint battle.

This is what the full story looks like: 
SA’s National Space Programme,  known as “Vision for 2030”, will be a roadmap guiding SA’s space activities for the next 20  years.

 The fledgling South African National Space Agency (Sansa) needs a space programme in order to get funding for projects by the state. It is mandated to co-ordinate SA’s space science and technology research,  and act as an advisory body to the minister, and it is state funded to do that.
“What will our space programme be in 2030?” Sansa CEO Sandile Malinga asks. “What system will we have, what technologies will we have? What people will we have? What programmes and services will we be running?”

Last week, expert panels gave presentations about what they thought should be included in the National Space Programme. These presentations were effectively a wish list of what the different panels would do in the next 20 years.

They represented four areas of space technology: earth observation, space operations, space engineering and space science.

Earth observation supplies satellite data on natural resources, such as water, land use and crop monitoring;  disaster management; and integrated spatial planning,  amongst other things.

One of the points  the earth observation team raised was connectivity. “We need to get data from Sansa to the municipalities,” the Agricultural Research Council’s Terry Newby said. Linked to this was outreach and awareness “to promote earth observation in daily decision making and planning”.
The only aspect with an  obvious price tag is an earth observation data centre, a central hub to collate and disseminate information. “It would require hardware, software, wetware — those are the people — and business systems,” Dr Newby said.

However, if space engineering got everything on its wish list, it would come at a hefty price. Space engineering’s responsibilities include building and putting satellites into space.

This group had a number of possible projects: earth observation missions, space science missions, flexible commercial missions, human capital develop training missions and possibly the development of launching capacity.

Each of these categories is divided into time frames: immediate (one to two years), short-term (two to five years), medium term (five to 10 years) and long term (10 to 20 years).

The earth observation mission plugs into the African Resource Management Constellation (ARMC). SA, Algeria, Kenya and Nigeria are part of the constellation, which requires each member to launch a satellite to monitor their region’s water, agriculture, climate and human settlement patterns.

The most immediate project would be SA’s contribution to the constellation, “a technology demonstrator”, says Herman Steyn from Stellenbosch University’s space engineering group.
“(We have) to prove that we have the technology that can operate (our contribution) which will be built with more money than was used for Sumbandila,” he said.

SumbundilaSAT was SA’s now-defunct “pathfinder” and had an official price tag of R26m, which is very cheap for a satellite. Communication with the satellite was lost last year. In the short-, medium and long-term, there were proposals for a number of constellations to observe the region’s natural resources.

SA also has an Ibsa (India-Brazil-SA) agreement to put a research satellite into orbit to observe the Southern Atlantic Anomaly, an area  which exposes  satellites to elevated levels of radiation.

This should form part of the National Space Programme, Dr Steyn said. Brazil would supply the majority of the science baseload, India would provide the launch and ground support, and SA would build the satellite.
 A thorny issue is the development of launch capacity.

Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor last year mentioned the possibility of reviving SA’s old rocket-launching facilities, which would allow the country to launch its own satellite-bearing rockets.
In the Apartheid regime, the rocket-launching facility was linked to the development of nuclear weapons.
 She also said her department’s aim was to capture a share of the global market for small- to medium-sized satellites.

Eugene Avenant spoke for Sansa’s space 0operations division, a long running programme offering tracking and telemetry support for satellites.  “We know our clients, we know what we are doing…. We’re not starting things from scratch,” he said.
“Our requirement is defined by the other groups.”

This group’s main request was to become part of Egnos, the European Geosynchronous Navigation Operating System, which is responsible for correcting errors in GPS. “There is a strategic and economic benefit to being part of Egnos…. We’ve booked a place, but we haven’t paid for it yet. It’s urgent or we miss the train,” Mr Avenant said.

Presenter for space science, Lea-Anne McKinnell, said: “Whatever we come up with, we have to sell according to its importance to the nation.”
She highlighted scientific disciplines such as the status of the space environment, life forms in space, space science in remote areas such as Antarctica, and threats from space, such as adverse space weather.

“If you’re going to do science, you need to ask the big science questions,” she said, saying that their panel had come up with three.

“What is the global space impact on earth? What are its effects on the sustainability of life in our solar system? How important is the magnetosphere to the development and survivability of life?” The magnetosphere is the region surrounding Earth that is formed by the Earth’s magnetic field, and solar winds and magnetic field.

All of the panels highlighted human capital development as a focus area.
“We don’t have the depth of knowledge required to handle a space programme,” Dr Newby said.

Dr McKinnell said that it was mistaken to think that only scientists were needed for a space programme. “We don’t only need physicists. We need engineers, mathematicians, software engineers….
“The space programme must use those people, and the excitement (generated) so that people are queuing at the door to be part of this programme,” Dr McKinnell said. “We need to develop programmes that would enable people to do space science, but also to develop skills that would allow them to go anywhere, such as industry.

However, the government’s pockets are not infinite. Dr Malinga says the programme proposed to the government would come in options: “The business as usual option, the intermediate option and the super-duper option.”

“The plan we provide will prioritise things, with things that are essential and need to be done as a matter of urgency,” he says.
All discussions and reviews of the National Space Programme would be completed by June, Sansa said.
wilds@bdfm.co.za