TOM EATON | SA is still years away from putting Afronauts in space

The South African National Space Agency has politely dismissed claims that it plans to send two female astronauts to the International Space Station within the next two years, presumably because the next two slots for South Africans have already been booked by the Nkandla Travel Agency, one way, on the next available flight.

At first glance it seemed like a slightly alarming retraction. I mean, when you’re strapping people onto the ends of gigantic tubes of fiery death, you can’t really be the sort of person who has slips of the tongue, like when you mean to say “Gary, please, this is not the time, let’s switch off the live sport” and you accidentally tell Gary to switch off the life support.

The error, however, was not on the part of local mission control, and everything became very clear when I read that the comment had been made by the Russian embassy in South Africa, an institution that stands alongside Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as one of the great writers of Russian fiction. If the Russian embassy told me that Earth is a sphere, I would have to consider the very real possibility that we, in fact, live on a flying disk with a ring of mountains round the outside the keep the oceans from falling off the edge.

If the Russian embassy told me that the Earth is a sphere, I would have to consider the very real possibility that we, in fact, live on a flying disk with a ring of mountains round the outside the keep the oceans from falling off the edge.

In the embassy’s version of events, SANSA CEO Humbulani Mudau made the say during the opening of what the media called a “Russian space debris detection centre in South Africa”.

I don’t know if this a centre to track space debris, built and run by Russia, or a centre to track Russian space debris, but I do know that space debris of any nationality is a huge and growing problem. As space junk clogs our near space, the satellites that run our world are in increasing danger of being smashed by high-speed trash, and it is vital for Russia to be able to track the movements of Wagner assets in Africa — sorry, I mean, “track space debris” from South Africa, which has beautifully clear skies and blessedly few qualms about working with a country currently committing war crimes in Ukraine.

Mudau, however, has gently and diplomatically walked back the Russians’ claims, saying that SANSA is still “years away” from putting Afronauts in space.

I must say I find this quite surprising. After all, South Africans have never been better prepared to live on the ISS. We’ve been floating in a vacuum for years now, getting sporadic updates via our screens while we learned how to live in partial darkness and run everything off batteries. We even drag our poop around with us, though down here the waste disposal container is called “cadre deployment”.

Still, there’s always the future. Just as long as our next generation of Afronauts are ready to elbow their way past Passenger Zuma, desperately trying to stuff a bulging suitcase — and Passenger Manyi — into the overheard bins ...