So many strong opinions here from commenters who aren’t actually from Botswana. Let me tell you how we actually feel about it here.
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!
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.
My father/grandfather were avid fans of international broadcasts. VoA, Radio Nippon, Deutsche Weller, BBC. By our childhood, TV came with 2 channels and in adolescence 60. My son has access to YouTube, Netflix...
I am Polish; I didn't grew up during period of Communist occupation, but I've certainly heard of stories of people risking their wellbeing via trying to listen to VoA. It was very much a big crime.
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.
Absolutely fantastic!! I love Botswana. I spent quite a lot of time in Gaborone for work. Growing up my home town was 80 kilometres from the Botswana border and we regularly visited friends there. I am so happy to see this news. Botswana has a special place in my heart. Well done Botswana! I can’t wait to see what else comes next.
Congratulations! And thank you for sharing an informed perspective (maybe the only one in this discussion!). As you know, Botswana is also one of Africa's leading democracies.
Great to hear the positive note. There was a lot of armchair commentary when India launched its space program and got its satellites in orbit. And your disregard for those voices is exactly how I felt when it happened here in India. Congratulations to Botswana!
Don't worry too much about negative opinions, there is usually a strong bias against non-US projects in the English speaking web.
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.
Until very recently I worked for an international remittances company. It's remarkable how far behind the U.S. is, and I always tell people the first countries to go (mostly) cashless with mobile wallets are in East Africa... e.g. Kenya had a ton of people using MPesa long before many European/North American/Asian countries had anything analogous.
The world - good and bad, becomes invisible though behind the culture war cliches. They tell you alot about the participants- very little about the world as it is.
Do you see signs of Africa undergoing the developmental transformation we’ve seen in past decades in places like China and Vietnam? I’ve been expecting it for a while.
Well, scoped to just Botswana, when my dad was 10, in the 60's, we had just 15km of tar road in the whole country.
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.
Africa is not a country. Some countries in Africa are doing much better than others. Some are the stereotype of a new revolution every few years bringing in a new corruption. Some are stable and growing.
> 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".
>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?
When USSR launched the world's first satellite into space, the enthusiasm was universal. Even among its peasants who at the time were paperless indentured servants.
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.
Can we maybe not shit on this parade? The number of non-disgusting governments world in space-capable nations currently sits at zero. It doesn't detract from this achievement, and people are right to celebrate it.
Along similar lines, Guatemala launched it's first satellite QUETZAL-1. It was in space for 211 days. While the technology isn't groundbreaking compared to satellites built by developed countries, it's massive in terms of inspiring future STEM students. Brain drain is a real problem. Providing pathways to scientific careers in smaller countries is objectively a Good Thing.
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.
Probably because people are annoyed that "launching satellites" is portrayed as a major feat (as it once was), when nowadays launching a CubeSat is not that impressive.
Don’t want to belittle the achievement but 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.
Very few organizations and even countries can develop both a launch vehicle and a satellite. Botswana has done fine to develop a satellite that integrates onto a rideshare launch. They aren't working with anything close to the headcount or budget of NASA or even the ESA.
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.
Maybe my comment should have been more clear. I don’t think it’s surprising or bad that they don’t have their own launch vehicle, I just found the headline a bit misleading because it could sound that way. It’s still a great achievement.
I mean basically everyone launches their first satellite using a third party launch provider which is usually SpaceX. If there's someone missing credit here it's Endurosat for providing the satellite bus and doing integration work, but the payload and operation which is the novel bit will be Botswanan. It's like you don't have to credit Linus Torvalds or Brendan Eich for their contributions to your first web service...
(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)
My problem isn’t that they used a provider for the launch.
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.
Plenty of small nation states have the financial resources and a government ministry-level "space" department that has the money to launch up to like, a 6U size cubesat, but don't have their own launcher. This is in fact more normal than not, if you look at a map of countries which have their own locally developed, frequently-in-use launchers capable of sending at least 100kg to low earth orbit, vs those which do not.
> 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.
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.
To compare what NASA does to this seems like a soft discrimination of low expectations, which is so common when referring to developing countries.
These types of countries can't even keep power, internet WAN, mobile RAN/Core, infra up on a consistent basis. I knew it had to be something like this. Yes, mask off. Yes, I am tired.
I'm curious, which "type" of country are you saying Botswana is?
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...
> 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.
I am not saying that this is the case with Botswana but it could also be a matter of priorities. At least North Korea is able to do orbital launches while the living conditions of an average citizen is less than ideal.
But you did mean to belittle the achievement, just like when people say, "I don't mean to offend you but ...", they know they are going to offend you and still choose to by saying what they wanted to say.
Of course, even Europe cannot launch cheaply anymore. Arianespace is crawling to space; they are left for dead. The only serious players are the US and China. It's reached a point where it has become like trying to manufacture a state-of-the-art 5nm chip in a developing nation: possible, but at an absurd cost. You might achieve an initial parametric yield of only 10%, meaning only a tiny fraction of the chips coming off the line meet the basic electrical specifications. Even then, the functional yield (the percentage that actually performs the intended computation correctly at the target speed) might be even lower, say 5%. You'd be throwing away 95 out of every 100 chips, and the cost per usable die would be astronomical due to the sheer expense of acquiring and maintaining the lithography equipment, cleanroom facilities, and specialized expertise – resources that are heavily concentrated in a few leading nations and require years, if not decades, to build from scratch.
SpaceX didn't spend an absurd amount of money getting Falcon 9 to where it is. It was a lot, but pretty typical, even somewhat cheap, for developing a brand new rocket. Repeating their feat should be even cheaper, since you won't be taking detours trying out parachutes and such before settling on the final architecture. It's a relatively straightforward application of known technology, not bleeding edge stuff like 5nm chip making.
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.
Readit News
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!
> .. 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.
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?
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.
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.
Yours, a friend from another developing country
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.
Vietnam and China have very stable (albeit dictatures) governments that invest heavily in education and infrastructure.
Most of Africa, except some places like Botswana is very unstable politically. Plenty of conflicts, insane corruption levels.
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".
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?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu
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.
Botswana is one of the most developed countries in the world on many aspects like democracy, press and political freedom or gender equality.
Dead Comment
Congrats, but the article says that the satellite is being deployed by SpaceX.
https://www.uvg.edu.gt/cubesat-en/
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.
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.
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.
It’s more a case of does it make economic or strategic sense to do so. For most countries it wouldn’t.
I would remove the last three words from that.
Launch vehicles are hard. Satellites are easy. This is a cubesat, even.
(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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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...
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.
You literally did.
> as it sounds like on the first read
That's your interpretation, the title literally says: "Botswana launches first satellite BOTSAT-1 aboard SpaceX Falcon 9 "
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.
Forgot one
https://www.rocketlaunch.live/?filter=roscosmos