Op-Ed Contributors

South Africa extends its frontier to space

By G. Pascal Zachary (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-18 07:57

Farmers, for example, might choose crops and growing patterns based on knowledge from earth observations. And, because space exploration requires communications and control over vast distances, some of the applications could also enhance South Africa's lucrative mining sector; after all, controlling machines under the ground is similar to doing so in deep space.

To be sure, South Africa's push to join the world's technological leaders is not limited to space research. The country is also home to thriving communities of scientists and engineers specializing in nuclear and solar energy, software encryption, coal-to-oil conversion and even electric cars.

No other African country comes close to matching South Africa in even a single area of research and development. Based on published research papers, the country accounts for 64 percent of all research undertaken in Africa.

"There are a lot of surprising innovations coming from South Africa," says David Kaplan, an economist at the University of Cape Town who specializes in tracking technological change. "But the gap between esoteric knowledge and economic applications remains large." Closing that gap should happen more quickly with the help of the international community. Not only does the world's largest telescope network "belong in Africa", says Sune Svanberg, a physicist at Lund University in Sweden, but also "good forces can join with the African scientist to create many small-scale projects in the region that are realistic to operate".

The author has the book, Married to Africa: a Love Story to his credit.

Project Syndicate

(China Daily 06/18/2010 page9)