Science fiction writer Larry Niven shrewdly observed: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space programme." Africa, the cradle of mankind, has been slow to heed the warning, but that could be about to change.
A decision by the African Union to approve a feasibility study for the creation of an African Space Agency prompted debate. A summit of ministers agreed that the study would also draft a common space policy for the 53 member countries. Some commentators argue that a rival to Nasa could provide jobs and spin-off technology. Others said the continent can ill-afford to pour scarce resources into stargazing when millions continue to face poverty, disease and food shortages.
But the future is already here, if unevenly distributed. Astronomers have worked in Cape Town for centuries and in 1820 established the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere. Africa has launched several satellites and, in 2002, internet millionaire Mark Shuttleworth flew on a Russian Soyuz rocket to become the first African in space.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recently awarded Cape Town its Global Astronomy for Development Office to help take astronomy to the developing world. Africa is also competing with Australia in a bid to host the world's most powerful radio telescope, able to peer back billions of years in time.
An international panel is expected to announce the winner from the two shortlisted continents in 2012, with the victor hosting the £1.25bn Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, 50 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than any other radio imaging telescope built.
The SKA telescope would eventually consist of about 3,000 antennas, half concentrated on the outskirts of Carnarvon in the Northern Cape in South Africa, with the rest distributed in Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Ghana, Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya and Zambia.
, Johannesburg
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