A non-profit organisation from Cape Town called the Foundation for Space Development wants inspire Africa’s youth by undertaking the continent’s first mission to the moon and transmitting images from either a probe on the lunar surface or from a satellite orbiting it.
“The mission will also provide a platform for one or more scientific experiments, to be defined by the scientific community,” the organisation says on its website. “In this way the mission will also contribute to humankind’s knowledge of the moon and form part of Africa’s contribution to global space exploration activities.”
In order to make this dream a reality, the foundation has undertaken crowdfunding campaigns on IndieGoGo and CauseVox under the tag #Africa2Moon. The Indiegogo campaign runs until 18 January 2015 and has raised $142 to date. The CauseVox campaign, meanwhile, has managed to raise a far more impressive figure of $12 500 and ends on 31 January 2015.
The goal is to raise $150 000 for the first phase of the project. “This preliminary phase will comprise the development of the mission concept and associated feasibility study. This study will be the starting point for the next phase of #Africa2Moon, which will be a detailed mission design.” This first phase will run from January to November 2015.
Phase II of the project will involve formulating a “detailed mission design”. According to the foundation, inspiration is key to stemming the so-called “brain drain” caused by graduates leaving Africa to work or study further elsewhere and “enable the people of Africa to bridge the humanitarian and economic divides and our financial dependence on the rest of the world”.
Watch the organisation’s #Africa2Moon video below:
[youtube url=”http://youtu.be/kDjHRlW6aQ0″]
