The French Embassy in South Africa has highlighted the cooperation between the two countries’ space agencies. These are Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES – the National Centre for Space Studies) and the South African National Space Agency. 

This followed the two agencies reaching an implementation agreement for the framework cooperation partnership they signed in 2019. This partnership was part of a wider programme to strengthen scientific connections and exchanges between the two countries in fields of mutual interest and to improve the response to worldwide challenges and issues.

French-South African cooperation regarding space dated back to 1964. That was the year South Africa started hosting a ground station, at Hartebeesthoek, west of Pretoria, to support French space launches. (Hartebeesthoek was now the site of Sansa Space Operations.)

Under the latest partnership agreement, CNES and Sansa would work together in three main areas. These were climate research, space-based monitoring of malaria zones and nanosatellites. 

In the sphere of climate research, the agencies would implement the African arm of the Space Climate Observatory (SCO). The SCO drew on space expertise from all around the world to observe the effects of climate change, with the intent of becoming an important tool to help with decision-making.

Space-based monitoring would also be harnessed to help fight malaria. It would combine tele-epidemiology data, collected by satellites, with data on global warming. A similar approach could also be used to identify the scale and consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In the field of nanosatellites, the two space agencies will study the interoperability capabilities of French and South African satellite constellations, in particular for the collection of marine and environmental data,” said the Embassy. “They will also work together to train instructors in cubesat technologies (specifically, nanosatellites) in particular by contributing to CNES’s UniverSpace and TTVS [Spacecraft Techniques and Technology] space vehicle engineering and technologies programmes.”