Ghana: In Africa, the sky’s now the limit

Beside a coconut farm in this lush mountain town squats the signature endeavor of Ghana’s Space Science and Technology Center. It is a satellite dish, rusted and infested with bees, that technicians hope to convert into a stargazing radio telescope.

In May, this West African country became the new on the continent to set up a space program, highlighting how governments here are turning to private companies and regional economic power South Africa for a lift into space.

Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda as well are stepping into space—using shoestring budgets to create high-tech jobs, get satellite data on their landscapes and inspire citizens to study science.

A decade ago, African governments remained too broke and space exploration prohibitively expensive. Presently, amid a continental economic boom, the world’s poorest continent is getting richer as space exploration is getting cheaper. Sub-Saharan Africa’s economy managed 5.3% increase this year, inflating the coffers, and space ambitions, of government.

That shift, the thinking goes, creates opportunities for companies positioned to supply and advise Africa’s niche space programs.

One such company is Britain’s Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., which last year helped Nigeria engineer two satellites that are photographing the country’s shrinking farmland. The data help farmers and central bankers alike rework finances ahead of drought. Scientists from Kenya and Ghana are as well talking to Surrey about smaller, suitcase-size satellites that will survey their farmland.

“Around Africa, there’s a whole lot of up-and-coming nations…looking to do things,” says Owen Hawkins, Surrey’s business-development manager.

In Uganda, the country’s African Space Research Program is working independently, funded entirely by wealthy citizens. Working out of a donor’s backyard, the $45 million program wants to launch a camera-equipped satellite next year.

“We’re building this ourselves, we’ve at no time consulted anybody,” says Chris Nsamba, who runs the program. “In Uganda…we teach ourselves how to do something.”

Critics say Uganda and other African nations would get additional data, additional economically, by buying it from foreign satellites. And Africa’s engineers would get additional technical experience, faster, if governments dispatched them to space programs abroad, says Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, a Ghanaian who is a senior robotics engineer at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Government.

“In this part of the world, they have this uncanny probability of starting certain projects and at no time finishing,” he says. “It’s dotted amount around the continent.”

Kofi Ashilevi, director of Ghana’s Space Center, says his country’s interests wouldn’t be represented adequately in NASA projects and local engineers wouldn’t win leadership roles.

Plus, Mr. Ashilevi says, he wants to inspire African school children to venture into space someday.

He as well hopes to open a space museum.

.”Something that makes science additional enticing so that they can grab onto it at that tender age…that’s my dream,” says Mr. Ashilevi, shuffling his dress shoes through the overgrown grass around the unfinished space-center headquarters.

Until May Mr. Ashilevi ran a small vocational school. Presently he runs a space program that will seek $5 billion in funding from international donors. The center is still assembling the funding proposals.

The prime step is to make a radio telescope out of the Nkuntese telecommunications dish, which was commissioned in 1981 and donated to Ghana’s government last year by Vodafone Group PLC. VOD.LN -0.16%
The dish will pick up radiation drifting to Earth from the prime 400,000 years of time.

For South Africa, which is helping to fund the Nkuntese renovation, Ghana’s vantage point offers an expansive view of the Milky Way.

The 2,500 miles between the two nations would help in triangulating data on the quasars and deep-space radiation flare-ups that scientists hope to observe with the telescopes, says Anita Loots, a South African radio astronomer.

Prime, the telescope needs a lot of work. Engineers will have to mend the leaky roof, replace the rusted legs of the 260-ton dish and get rid of nesting bees.

Next, workers must verify that the dish can move. Telecom antennas sit idle for months, but radio telescopes must swivel quickly to calibrate against distant stars. The motherboard for a control panel recently caught fire at the same time as technicians tried to steer the dish. In January engineers will test each bolt to ensure that the dish can brake without toppling over.

If amount goes well, South Africa will convert idle antennas in Kenya, Zambia, and Madagascar into a continentwide network of telescopes. That would be a prelude for the Square Kilometer Array—a $1.87 billion telescope nest, the world’s biggest, based in South Africa.

Come 2025, South Africa would like to build at least one other, much additional sophisticated telescope up in Ghana’s north for the array. Scientists at that facility would track radiation hinting at how the universe began, says Ms. Loots, who is an associate director for the Square Kilometer Array.

But prime, Ghana’s Space Center needs a good welder to mend bolts on the Nkuntese dish. The preferred candidate let his certification expire and needs cash for his recertification test. At a recent conference of Ghanaian space engineers, a visiting South African official agreed to lend the $200 for that to happen.