Make cubesat funding count, Mjwara tells CPUT

A South African project to launch an array of small satellites to monitor ships and wildfires has been given a funding boost. But government officials urged the project’s managers to make the funding count in the face of restrictions on public spending.

The Cape Town Peninsula University of Technology will receive R27 million (US$1.94m) over the next three years to launch the constellation of cube satellites, the director-general of the Department of Science and Technology announced on 26 February.

Phil Mjwara made the announcement at the unveiling of the first data to be beamed back from CPUT’s second cube satellite, ZACube-2, launched in Russia in December last year. The additional funding supplements the R16.5m that the DST has invested in CPUT’s satellite programme since 2009.