AFRICA’s first spaceman, Mark Shuttleworth, was on Sunday wished a good trip and decent weather by South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, as the astronaut prepared to blast off next week.
”You are a very brave and gifted person who has made the whole of South Africa proud,” Zuma wrote in an open letter to Shuttleworth, who has gone to the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Shuttleworth (28) will blast off on Thursday in a Soyuz capsule heading to the International Space Station (ISS), on a 10-day mission with Russian commander Yury Gidzenko and Italian engineer Roberto Vittori.
”I must warn you, though, that when you return we will be counting on you to share your experience… (and) assist us in encouraging South African children to be more interested in science and mathematic,” Zuma told the multi-millionaire, who made his fortune as an information technology advisor.
”I hope to see you soon when you return and I hope the weather will be kind to you. Please always know that our thoughts are with you,” Zuma added.
Shuttleworth, who was born in Cape Town, is paying about S20-million (23-million euros) to become the second ”space tourist” after 60-year-old American Dennis Tito.
Saying he was not just going for the ride, he has been given experiments to conduct by South African universities, including the growth in micro-gravity of cells taken from sheep and mice, and research into HIV proteins.
South Africa has the world’s greatest number of citizens with the HIV virus that causes Aids ? around 4,7-million ? and some 70 000 HIV-positive babies are born every year.
The US space agency NASA initially objected to Tito’s trip, but there has been no such trouble between Russia and its western partners over Shuttleworth’s stay on the space station.
But some South African papers have wondered whether he will really be the ”first African in space”, pointing out that Patrick Baudry, a Frenchman who flew on the US shuttle Discovery in 1985, was born in Cameroon.
This week’s response from a firm representing Shuttleworth’s interests in South Africa, Interactive Africa, was clear: ”Mark is the first person who is going up under an African flag as an African citizen and having grown up in Africa we feel well qualified that he is the first African in space.”
Zuma shared this view.
”We are also proud of you because you are the first resident of the African continent to go into space,” he wrote. ”This is a great achievement for the continent.” – Sapa