(CNN)They may be teenagers, but 17-year-old Brittany Bull and 16-year-old Sesam Mngqengqiswa have big ambitions — launching Africa’s first private satellite into space in 2019.
You are part of a team of high school girls from Cape Town, South Africa who have designed and built payloads for a satellite that will orbit the Earth’s poles and scan Africa’s surface.
Once in space, the satellite will collect information on agriculture and food security on the continent.
With the data that is sent, “we can try to identify and predict what problems Africa will face in the future,” says Bull, a student at Pelican Park High School.
“Where our food grows, where we can plant more trees and vegetation, and how to monitor remote areas,” she says. “We have a lot of wildfires and floods, but we don’t always get out in time.”
Information received twice a day is incorporated into civil protection.
It is part of a project by South Africa’s Meta Economic Development Organization (MEDO) working with Morehead State University in the US.
Ambitious first
The girls (14 in total) are being trained by satellite engineers from Cape Peninsula University of Technology to encourage more African women into STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).
If the launch is successful, MEDO will be the first private company in Africa to build and send a satellite into orbit.
“We expect a good signal that will allow us to get reliable data,” explains an enthusiastic Mngqengqiswa from Philippi High School. “In South Africa we have seen some of the worst floods and droughts and it has really hit farmers hard.”
Drought and environmental impacts of climate change have continued to plague the country in recent years. A drought caused by El Niño resulted in a 9.3 million tonne shortfall in maize production in southern Africa in April 2016, according to a UN report.
“It brought our economy down… It’s a way of seeing how we can boost our economy,” says young Mngqengqiswa.
Inspirational girls
In the early attempts, the girls programmed and launched small CricketSat satellites with high-altitude weather balloons before finally helping to configure the satellite payloads.
Small format satellites are inexpensive ways to quickly collect data on the planet. Tests to date have involved collecting thermal imaging data, which is then interpreted for early detection of floods or droughts.
“This is a new field for us [in Africa] but I think we could change our economy positively with it,” says Mngqengqiswa.
Ultimately, the project will include girls from Namibia, Malawi, Kenya and Rwanda.
Mngqengqiswa comes from a single-parent household. Her mother is a domestic worker. By becoming a space engineer or astronaut, the teenager hopes to make her mother proud.
“Discovering space and seeing the Earth’s atmosphere is something that many black Africans have not been able to do or have the opportunity to see,” says Mngqengqiswa.
The schoolgirl is right; In half a century of space travel, no black African has traveled into space. “I want to see these things myself,” says Mngqengqiswa, “I want to be able to experience these things.”
Her teammate Bull agrees: “I want to show other girls that we don’t have to sit around or limit ourselves. Any career is possible – even in aerospace.”
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