Botswana launches first satellite BOTSAT-1 aboard SpaceX Falcon 9
We think it’s awesome! The establishment of a university of science and technology in Botswana has been a long hard road, and many mistakes have been made along the way. But the fact that Botswana now has the local skill to deploy a satellite and make use of the data it provides to inform decisions blows my mind.
I grew up in the village that now hosts the university. We were so isolated back then that I’d listen to the Voice of America and marvel at the things that were being done in the developed world, and wonder if we would ever be able to participate in that level. The fact that a smart kid can grow up to attend a local university and end up launching a SATELLITE INTO SPACE is incredible!
A common trick is to have an office in USA and make it hard to figure out where's your project actually based. There's usually some sympathy for the British and Israeli, then you get some envy for the Russian and Japanese based stuff if they are doing something authentic or feeds into the stereotypes. Lastly you can get sympathy based on current culture war or political talking points(EU lately gets some sympathy and heat for being not-Trump for example). They will deny it but it is true, if you read the English-only web you will get the impression that no one outside the US does anything innovative and the rest of the world just lives lives of a caricature.
The last few years many people were involved in fintech assuming that outside the US consumer banking must be horrible or non-existent if its that bad the USA. Many got investment in blockchain BS that will bring banking and online payments to Africa or Asia or something, only to fail once they realized that in many of those places that tech was much more developed and widely used than the US!
No wonder the negativity when you mention Botswana :) You should pair it with something to create a story. Maybe start a Bitcoin national reserves or make Firefox the default browser on government computers, anything that a group of people have opinions(if Botswana is taking on tech giants and launching a satellite, some people will be rooting for Botswana and will write how the company they hate is finished thanks to the Botswana's satellite). Even better if you can incorporate something hot like AI, from an underdog like Anthropic ideally.
outside the US consumer banking must be horrible or non-existent if its that bad the USA
When I read about US consumer banking ("cashing" cheques like its 1975, all kinds of ATM fees, credit scores and having to use weird "you are not really sending money real time but because the app you are sending the payment instruction through is legit you can sort of be assured the money will be paid eventually") and then look at the European payments landscape...I feel happy.
Your banks are robbing you, and no one seems to care.
The issue is that the US banking system is highly fragmented, making universal change difficult. Most other countries have fewer, larger banks (which does introduce other problems that regulation has to be active with), but it means that they can gather together and agree on standards far quicker. Most other countries also have more active regulation pushing universal standards than the US historically did.
not that it makes a difference - us law puts the liability on banks. Chip and pin is needed in backwards places where a stolen credit card is the consumers problem. It adds no security to the individual in the us. When banks decided to care chips got rolled out. They don't think pin is useful enough to be worth the hasstle so we don't have the.
Our banking ecosystem is extremely fragmented with thousands of small banks and credit unions, we aren't like Canada where the 5 largest banks control nearly the entire market and can change things relatively quickly.
It is possible in the US. But somehow it's not happening.
I'm not sure many American's even realise how god awful their setup is.
The vast majority of average americans don't leave the town/city/area they grew up in. They have NO CLUE what the world is like, other than what they glean from hollywood, and "American exceptionalism" is an absurdly effective propaganda campaign.
I understand that w bills with serial numbers, cash is also trackable, but there's something deeply authoritarian about monetary systems predicated on a fiat currency with no physical representation.
Going to have to start buying little bags of silver coins with which to effect personal trade
Another thing is, Europe tends to have parliamentary democracies, so if your party loses an election it doesn’t mean it’s all over, it means you your say is smaller but still relevant.
So in Europe governments are politically inefficient but the state is usually alright, it keeps working regardless of the political situation. There are instances where there’s is no president or government for years.
Anyway, if you hate your government that much or don’t trust it that much why don’t you fix it instead of making your life hard?
.. I’d listen to the Voice of America..
I grew up listening to VoA as a kid as well, I was born in a then not so developed part of the Balkans. Sometimes I have the feeling that the ordinary Americans don't have a clue about the impact VoA had in the countries like ours.
Radio Liberty was employing variety of native journalists living abroad but with the intention to talk about their native countries and cultures.
The amount of influence it had on the generation is hard to overestimate. It was also shut down recently by the DOGE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
Sometimes I have the feeling that the ordinary Americans don't have a clue about the impact VoA had in the countries like ours.
It's not a feeling. They don't know because domestic broadcasts of VoA were prohibited by federal law.
Good luck to anyone in a shitty regime that thought they could at least rely on American propaganda to get some useful info from an alternative. Despite VoA being cheap and enormously effective, and being something no Americans care about, he still kills it.
Gee, I wonder who benefits most from VoA dying?
My best answer is that listening to the VoA as a kid was just way more fun than the BBC. And maybe it being propaganda was a big reason for that. Stories were simple, there were good guys and bad guys, science was awesome and we might make it to Mars by the year 2000.
As I got older, I started to see that things weren’t so simple, I wanted unbiased, or at least balanced, reporting about the region I lived in, and then BBC Africa took over.
Let me tell you how we actually feel about it here.
Can we have the opinion not from some privileged elites, but of the oppressed majority, who are literally starving to involuntarily under threat of execution finance all this support projects for this disgusting government?
Even among its peasants
No, it wasn't. This is Soviet propaganda, that existed only because people who expressed different opinions were killed. As far as I understand, the situation in Botswana is much better when it comes to expressing one's opinion. So I am interested in what they think about this issue.
A life anecdote: in mid 1980s my classmate shot the Lenin portrait in the classroom through a straw. His parents were called in and reprimanded. In 1950s they'd been in real trouble; in 1937 they would have been arrested, tortured and likely killed. In 1989 nobody would have cared.
Until the mid 2000s, if you good good enough grades at _any_ high school in the country, the government would foot the entire bill (tuition, board, stipend) to send you to a foreign university for the entirety of your degree. The only requirement was that you returned to Botswana to work back your tuition cost. Probably hundreds of thousands (and that's a lot in a country of 2 million people) of people benefited from this program.
Is it perfect? No. Do citizens have the same opportunities as an average person from an OECD country? Not even close. But you have to appreciate the incredibly low base Botswana started from, and how the government has spent the entirety of its existence ploughing resources into improving the human capital of its citizens.
The number of non-disgusting governments world in space-capable nations currently sits at zero.
You are now trivializing institutionalized mass oppression. We're talking about a country where HALF THE POPULATION IS STARVING RIGHT NOW.
Botswana is one of the most developed countries in the world on many aspects like democracy, press and political freedom or gender equality.
aspects like democracy, press and political freedom or gender equality
We are literally talking about country, where half the population are starving and 10 percent of children are DYING. But yeah, girls are dying not worse than boys, so amazing gender equality, best place on the Earth. All you need to know about fascists and their statistics.
At national level 53.29 percent of the population in Botswana was affected by moderate or severe food insecurity in 2021/22
Moderate or severe Food insecurity occurs when a person or household has limited or uncertain access to sufficient and healthy food because of financial limitations or other constraints.
As a result of financial or other constraints, people may have to compromise on the quality and quantity of their diets, but they do not necessarily suffer from extreme hunger or starvation.
* Under-five Mortality Rate: 38.7 deaths per 1,000 live births.
and dropping steadily from 77.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2000 24 years ago
In the 80's when we moved to the village I grew up in, we didn't have a phone - we had a telegraph address.
In the 90's, to get fresh fruit and cheese, we would drive for 3 hours across sand roads to another country to shop at a supermarket.
In 1998 my village got its first chain restaurant and it was a big deal.
In 2009 I tried to modernise the family business by getting our managers to use email and very few of them could navigate the internet. In 2012, my family's vegetable farming plot was one of many that were claimed by the government to start the BIUST and I couldn't fathom how they would staff it.
And in 2025, the BIUST launched a satellite.
Lots of problems, but certainly progress.
Yours, a friend from another developing country
But the fact that Botswana now has the local skill to deploy a satellite
Congrats, but the article says that the satellite is being deployed by SpaceX.
I’d listen to the Voice of America and marvel at the things that were being done in the developed world,
This is extra sad because the Trump administration has just killed Voice of America. Possibly fitting because this administration is also doing its best to eliminate the US being part of the "developed world".
Edit (rather than reply and make the comment chain long): It's fine that you read it that way. I figure that if the article were about a launch vehicle then it would have been the rocket's name in the title, and if the article were about the satellite then it would have the satellite's name (BOTSAT-1). If Botswana had developed both an orbital launch vehicle and their first satellite then I'd bet the headline would have been sensational.
Edit (rather than reply and make the comment chain long):
Sorry to go meta here, but this is just rude, both to OP and to other readers.
For OP, you're effectively pre-empting what they say with your own counterargument, and even more so you're removing the ability for them to counter your counter. You're essentially using the edit feature to end the conversation and ensure you have the final word.
For other readers, you're introducing confusing non-linear flow.
Just reply. It's not hard, and as you can see below you didn't actually prevent a subthread from forming.
Sorry to go meta here, but this is just rude, both to OP and to other readers. ... You're essentially using the edit feature to end the conversation and ensure you have the final word.
I've noticed this more and more, especially on more controversial topics (which this is certainly not).
Adam makes a statement, Betty responds. Adam responds, and Betty edits her initial response and conversation ends, likely because Adam didn't see the edit.
I personally think that in a no-holds-barred debate, you don't bother trying to convince your interlocutor of anything. You focus on persuading everyone else in the room. But it's rude to treat every polite conversation as a smackdown debate. Such a strategy can also backfire by turning off your intended audience, as evidenced here.
Imagine you're having an in-person conversation with someone in a crowded restaurant.
You're not in a crowded restaurant chatting with someone. You're in an online forum broadcasting messages to the vast nothingness.
Even if you weren't, you should still act as if you were in a crowded restaurant. Without agreeing to conventions for how a conversation should be conducted, you can't have any productive conversation at all. So what would be the point? If you ever sense that you're in an online forum broadcasting messages to the vast nothingness then you are truly only wasting your own time. (Which is why this is the only site I ever post on). At that point, just stop, put it down, walk outside and engage in any kind of real interaction you can find.
This isn't twitter. You're in a highly moderated forum in which both moderator and participants are bound by rule and custom to maintain civil behavior, in the best interest of everyone involved.
You're trying to make a storm in a teacup. OP literally edited his post to clearly state its fine if anyone interprete something differently. This is hardly outrage bait.
Try to direct your energy to something worth your time. Loudly complaining about vague subjective notions of netiquette in a moderated forum is certainly not it.
Try to direct your energy to something worth your time. Loudly complaining about vague subjective notions of netiquette in a moderated forum is certainly not it.
Maybe try not to tell other people what is important for them? That is part of the same debate, how we communicate and to me it also matters a lot.
Adam makes a statement, but the responses show the statement was unclear and/or leads into tangential arguments. An edit can clarify the initial statement for future readers without getting the original poster stuck in the back-and-forth necessary to escape whatever quagmire the unedited version created.
So you actually can’t finish the conversation when it has the utility to finish it
It seems like the system working as designed, to be honest.
It is not an automated system. I was punished years after creating my account, and after accumulating strong positive karma. It only took like one flagged comment for the punishment to be put in place, imo it was not a significantly out there comment or set of comments either, and it is now years old and it's pretty obvious these punishments have no automatic expiry or re-evaluating date.
This is despite plenty of other members of the community posting about 10x the amount I was at the time with zero repercussions, and despite the fact that I've gotten only a couple gentle warnings in particularly heated topics, which I demonstrably took to heart.
There is no justice or fairness inherent in HNs systems, and assuming so by default is less than great. The team is tiny, the rules are most likely set in stone from the early 2000s, the tooling is basically just whatever they can cobble together, the rules are purposely opaque, and Dang is a mere mortal full of his own biases and experiences that are impossible to fully prevent from affecting his decisions. I think he puts genuine effort into his work, and despite the occasional complaint I'd give him probably a B+ or better, but there are probably hundreds of HN commentators who were given a punishment, hopefully for good reason but don't take that for granted, literally reformed or just changed over time, and nobody even informed them they were punished or COULD have that punishment removed.
I have not emailed dang to get the punishment lifted because sometimes the limit is helpful to limit how distracted I am at work. Other times it completely prevents me from doing the exact kind of useful and productive conversation that HN insists it wants.
You could skip the disparaging characterizations and make your case for why you think it would be a good guideline. Ie, because it is confusing and non-linear, not because of a bunch of motivations you've inferred about a stranger.
etiquette has no objective basis and is always contingent
But what it's contingent on is what's actually manifest rather than some speculative hypothetical that seems a contrivance to nullify the applicability of any etiquette anywhere.
FWIW, the previous commenter's points that adding edits to an existing post in order to reply to comments further downstream is confusing and impolite behavior. It's useful on Reddit in response to malicious use of the ill-advised 'block' feature, but doesn't fit on HN.
It’s more a case of does it make economic or strategic sense to do so. For most countries it wouldn’t.
It is not our only space venture. Our universities are churning out aerospace engineers. It annoys STEM academics that the space industries keeps "poaching" the best grad students.
To the best of my knowledge, the company is not a strategic priority for New Zealand, we do not absolutely need to launch our own satellites. It is purely a commercial venture. They had no choice but to make it a joint effort.
If it was not a joint effort they would have far fewer customers and a extremely limited supply chain.
Quite a while ago when I met an MP who seemed interested in space. I asked if anything could be done to keep/inceltivize future space ventures fully on-shore. They shrugged their shoulders and said no.
Yes, I know you can launch from other locations, and my question is more of a curiosity.
1. Good atmospheric conditions. 2. Low air traffic. 3. Low/flexible/favourable regulations. 4. Good locations for ground infrastructure (in part because of 1. and also because everywhere is by the sea). 5. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, tertiary education geared to support the industry.
Also, and I don't know for sure this is a factor, but we have a number of specialised industries such as building large things from carbon composite (yachts) and radio communications for example.
I think option 3. is a big one. The govt. attitude is usually "give it a go", rather than a default "no".
Just remember that the best place the EU came up with is in south America. Places like mainland Netherlands probably qualify for the worst places to launch orbital rockets from.
Sure, developing a single satellite isn't something that makes a lot of sense in a first order economic assessment. They are definitely not going to be able to sell the data they collect for the millions of dollars they spent on the program. And they definitely spent more on the satellite than they would have spent buying equivalent imagery from commercial providers for the next few years. There is almost no chance that they will have a satellite with competitive technical specs.
But nobody is comparing Botswana to NZ. This is their first satellite. Having a satellite program at the national university is a point of national pride. It will inspire their young people and encourage them to study STEM. It gives valuable practical experience to their people, some of whom might go on to start a space systems company and bring high tech business opportunities to their country. This is a step toward moving part of their economy from being based on natural resources (diamonds, the value of which are subject to the whims of a cartel that they don't control), to being based on knowledge.
Very few organizations and even countries can develop both a launch vehicle and a satellite.
I would remove the last three words from that.
Launch vehicles are hard. Satellites are easy. This is a cubesat, even.
Developing a basic satellite is very straightforward at this point and there are countless unrecognizable companies that help do this.
It's technically true but makes the second one sound a lot harder than it really is. A hobbyist can make a cubesat, and if they do something clever they might even find a grant to pay for the launch.
> These included BOTSAT-1, 26 satellites as part of the Transporter-13 rideshare mission, and a trio of CubeSats for NASA’s Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) mission; Arvaker 1, the first microsatellite for Kongsberg NanoAvionics’ N3X constellation.
BOTSAT-1 is a 3U hyperspectral Earth Observation satellite
3U is a cubesat size, the most common one.
You can tell it's a cubesat from the picture in the article, and even better from the picture linked at "collaboration with EnduroSat". https://www.endurosat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BotSat-...
The notability is that they have a satellite up for their purposes; they're not trying to claim that they did the launch themselves.
If this were some random corporation, none of you wouldn't have blinked an eyelid at a title like "Megacorp successfully launches first satellite" when all but 3-4 companies in the world rely on someone else to do the launch.
There's more hair-splitting going on here than in a hair salon.
An organization that can produce Ariane 6 should be able to produce a Falcon 9 clone with similar effort. The real problem is overcoming the of the old, slow, expensive way of doing things.
I've been reading about Airbus' reusable/recoverable SpaceX-killers for over a decade now. They've yet to have anything to show for their work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline_(rocket_stage)
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33006056 ("Airbus unveils 'Adeline' re-usable rocket concept" (2015))
- "...Airbus says it has been working on the concept since 2010 and has even flight-tested small demonstrators..."
(That BBC article predates the first Falcon rocket landing).
SpaceX didn't spend an absurd amount of money getting Falcon 9 to where it is
That's part of the genius of SpaceX's approach, which culminated in achieving what no one else has achieved on a comparatively shoestring budget.
Credit where it's due: Elon Musk (a) comprehended enough of the technical challenge to ask great questions (and see through BS answers), (b) set and maintained a ruthlessly efficient operational vision, (c) repeatedly took existential financial risks to achieve the next milestone, and (d) set a company vision that motivated people to work extremely hard to achieve what was previously impossible, and (e) worked his butt off solving problem after problem alongside employees.
Love or hate him, very few leaders have ever existed who led companies to accomplish similar feats.
If anything Europe has the opposite problem: the launch startups are all far too small to do anything on a Falcon 9 scale. SpaceX did't get to Falcon 9 early either. Sure, Arianespace probably could build a Falcon 9 clone, but it's not something they'd want to self fund, and there's quite a few ESA members that don't want to see most of their budget contributions go to funding the development of a foreign launch monopolist...
The EU can certainly throw money at the problem but that doesn’t necessarily manifest cheap rockets. It’s a product of leadership and culture. My experience with the EU is one of a top heavy bureaucracy that’s not overly conducive to this type of cowboy rocketry. Consider the absence of an EU version of Silicon Valley, it’s just computers and with the internet people can program from anywhere…
Arianespace is so thoroughly broken that they genuinely believed that reusability, if they could even accomplish it, would be bad for their business because it would reduce the number of rockets they build. Bonkers.
The only serious players are the US and China
Forgot one
even I would award third place to India or CNSA
Money doesn't change hands for Russia launching astronauts or NASA launching cosmonauts
did you see my parent comment or not??? I am not trying to question their ability for them get to space, it doesn't matter if you CAN go to space but you didn't have money for it
its clear that NASA and Roscosmos collaboration days is numbered and would not continue in the future because geo politic
Don’t want to belittle the achievement but (...)
Yeah, but you kind of are.
(...) they launched it as in „had it launched by the commercial launch provider SpaceX“, not on a self-developed rocket as it sounds like on the first read.
Yes, it's the kind of thing that even NASA does nowadays.
Cool feat by Botswana. Outstanding.
To compare what NASA does to this seems like a soft discrimination of low expectations, which is so common when referring to developing countries.
From 1 highschool program in 2006 (TJ3SAT) there's now over 50 high scool programs launching cubesat style satellites. Some use base kits, making the launch even easier. Sure, it's amazing they have a bootstrapping engineering community in Botswana, but this isn't more sophisticated than a high school program with money to pay for the ride up.
I think you're trying very hard to grasp at straws to belittle a whole country, while being completely oblivious to the domain.
For reference, Ireland launched its first satellite on 2023. Does this give you the right to shit on Ireland's achievement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_satellites_by_co...
EIRSAT-1 (Educational Irish Research Satellite-1) is a European Space Agency-sponsored 2U CubeSat developed and built by University College DublinThe mission of EIRSAT-1 is to advance education in space science and engineering across the whole island of Ireland through collaboration between student teams, higher education institutions and high-tech companies.
Actually it looks like most of the first national satellites listed are operated by colleges and universities, not high schools.
(Fun fact: not only does SpaceX not care about not getting credit for rideshares, they actively request you don't mention them in advance publicity)
I just wanted to clarify because „X launches satellite“ sounds like X launched a rocket carrying a satellite, not that X made a satellite and had it launched by someone else.
Or maybe that’s just me, I’m not a native speaker.
(eg.) https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korea-flags...
It's even used in trade press articles about Falcon 9 launches of satellites operated by countries that once had homegrown launch capability and are actively investing in regaining it... https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/air/update...
Because spacex also makes satellites, they don’t want confusion about which satellites are theirs. “MyCompany Partners with SpaceX to launch new communications satellite” is not something their PR team wants to deal with disambiguating.
can't even keep power, internet WAN, mobile RAN/Core, infra up on a consistent basis.
You could say this as well about significant parts of Appalachia in the US and other impoverished regions of the US, and many first nations reserves in remote parts of Canada too.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEyPgwIPkHo5If6xyrkr-...
But Appalachia are not launching satellites. They DO have a space telescope!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Telescope
Very nice video also showing nice landscapes and towns :)
Exploring the Secret US Government Town with No Internet & Phone Service (100% Disconnected?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWJBAGrG0ms
and many first nations reserves in remote parts of Canada too
Ok, but it would be suprising if an article said they are launching a sattelite?
You could say this as well about significant parts of Appalachia in the US and other impoverished regions of the US
And the reaction here if say West Virginia launched a satellite would be the same: why are you wasting money doing this when <some statistic about widespread poor infrastructure and poverty>.
As far as I'm aware of Botswana does not have the power outages of its neighbour South Africa …
Perhaps you're right, maybe it is a mask off moment for you …
“Botswana, a landlocked country in Southern Africa, has recently made considerable strides in developing a reliable electricity supply network to support its growing economy and improve the quality of life for its citizens. However, occasional power outages and load shedding do still occur during peak demand periods or when there are unforeseen challenges, such as equipment failures or extreme weather events.” https://www.sinalda.com/world-voltages/africa/voltage-botswa...
It’s great that they’re making improvements in this are and that they’re not as bad as South Africa (assuming your claim is accurate, I haven’t compared the two). But the previous poster’s claim that power can’t be kept up on a consistent basis is accurate.
Source: Zimbabwean-South African-American
Make sure the same argument doesn't apply to any of the other countries with space assets!
This initiative will enable BIUST to build a sustainable pipeline of space technology projects while facilitating hands-on learning opportunities for students and researchers
Having been part of a student satellite program, and having subsequently built my career on it, I can tell you that there is nothing more efficient at teaching students than giving them a bunch of money and telling them to build a satellite.
This satellite will be operated for many years by many students who will learn practical knowledge about satellites.
Not sure exactly how essential indigenous Earth Observation capabilities are for Botswana, but Botswanan engineers who worked on it and their university would actually be pretty well placed for future collaboration with low cost satellite component manufacturers in South Africa...
1. Zimbabwe did the same thing a few years back. Source: https://itweb.africa/content/dgp45qaBBQevX9l8
2. The satellite eventually got lost in space. Source: https://www.nanosats.eu/sat/zimsat-1
I did not share an opinion. Simply stated two events that were a matter of fact. Yet someone I am being downvoted for this.
If you're completely avoiding any opinions or implications, then a fact about another country lacks relevance to the article. And comments lacking relevance generally get a downvote.
I have never been there (I grew up in Africa), but I have always been told that Botswana is one of the more stable nations in Africa (I grew up in … less stable … nations).
Africa has amazing amounts of natural resources, and the most energetic, passionate, people I’ve ever known.
Part 1: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0533567 Part 2: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0533529
Probably less sabotage and space laser weapons in the real thing.