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African moon mission project seeks funding

Johannesburg - Africa’s first-ever space mission to the moon could become reality if an organisation is able to raise enough funds for the project.

Cape Town non-profit, the Foundation for Space Development, has this month kick-started a crowdfunding campaign dubbed the '#Africa2Moon Mission’.

The funding initiative seeks raising $150 000 via websites such as Indiegogo and a CauseVox page for the project’s first phase, which comprises of “the development of the mission concept and associated feasibility study”.

In coming years, the mission aims sending an African lander or orbiter to the Moon to stream live images back to classrooms on the continent. In doing so, the project also hopes to inspire young Africans.

But before the project can reach this point, a first phase consisting of the mission concept and feasibility study is planned to run from January to November 2015.

“This study will be the starting point for the next phase of #Africa2Moon, which will be a detailed mission design,” say notes on the project’s crowdfunding web pages.

“The mission will also provide a platform for one or more scientific experiments, to be defined by the scientific community.

“In this way the mission will also contribute to humankind’s knowledge of the moon and form part of Africa’s contribution to global space exploration activities,” adds the project.

At the time of writing, the project has raised over $12 000 on CauseVox and only just above $100 on Indiegogo.

The Indiegogo crowdfunding project started on 19 November and closes on 18 January 2015. Meanwhile, the CauseVox funding round is scheduled to end on 31 January 2015.

Africa, though, is not the only part of the world eyeing moon landings.

India and Israel have expressed plans for moon landing projects while UK scientists have also kick-started a crowdfunding campaign for a lunar mission.

Watch a video for the project below:



* Follow @GarethvanZyl on Twitter. For more tech news, follow Fin24tech @Fin24_Tech.
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