What struck me most about this is not so much what is being said as opposed to what is not being said. There have been several media reports about how this issue came to a diplomatic head between SA & Russia, after SA wanted to launch its own military satellite. From what I recall, SA wanted to launch its own (home built) military satellite. Russia then offered SA use of one of its satellites and when the then Mbeki government rejected the offer, Russia refused to launch this satellite.

One can only but wonder what went on behind the scenes. But it does go to show that if the SA government want to swim with the sharks it’d better be prepared to be fodder. Let that be a lesson to the “revolutionaries”.

Well, almost. There are really three distinct but interrelated elements here: The pre-1994 government’s ballistic missile/space launcher and satellite program, the planned acquisition of a military reconnaissance sateliite and SunSpace, SunSat and SumbandilaSat.

Before the program’s cancellation in 1993/1994, South Africa was working on a range of ballistic missiles and space launchers, known as the RSA series. These ranged from the RSA-1 SRBM through to the RSA-2 MRBM, the RSA-3 and the unbuilt-but-planned RSA-4 ICBMs. The last two had sufficient range to function in an alternative role as space launchers, capable of placing useful payloads into Low-Earth Orbit.

At the same time Armscor’s Houwteq division was pursuing a parallel satellite development program which, during the 1980s, was focused on the development of a spy satellite. Obviously, having one or more locally-controlled spy satellites would have been immensely useful during the Border War period and would have helped plug the gap in SA’s surveillance capabilities.

But the war ended in 1989, after which the government cancelled the nuclear program and slashed the defence budget, stopping all military funding for both the ICBMs and the spy satellite. In response, the Houwteq division of Armscor (from 1992, Denel) attempted to continue marketing the RSA-3 and RSA-4 as space launch vehicles and repurposed the surveillance satellite that had been under development into the 300 kg GreenSat environmental monitoring satellite with a reduced sensor suite. But orders were never forthcoming and the entire program was eventually cancelled in the early 1990s. While some of the facilities still exist (such as the satellite integration facility, now occupied by the Institute for Satellite and Software Applications), nothing much goes on at them and the infrastructure is aging.

So when the SANDF decided it was going to procure a military surveillance satellite sometime in 2005/2006, it had no choice but to look to a foreign country to provide it, as the local surveillance satellite program was defunct and a final product had never been completed. And even if the program had been resurrected, it would have made little sense as it was by then terribly outdated, would have cost a fortune to upgrade and launch and in any case we’d have had to entrust its technology to whichever foreign country we asked to launch it. So in that case buying a proven design from Russia made a whole lot of sense. I have no idea why Lekota cancelled it, especially so late in the process, but it’s possible that for whatever reason the funds were no longer available to the SANDF and it ceased to be a viable option.

In contrast, SumbandilaSat has no direct link to either of those two elements. It was developed by SunSpace, a commercial company spun off from the University of Stellenbosch following their successful design, manufacture and launch (aboard a US rocket) of the SunSat 64 kg micro-satellite in 1999. Although both the company and university have used the old Houwteq testing facilities to test SunSat and SumbandilaSat and it’s possible that some of the professors may have worked on GreenSat, the company’s micro-satellites have no similarity with the GreenSat design. SumbandilaSat was purchased by the South African government, who concluded an agreement with Roskosmos to launch it. They in turn subcontracted to the Russian defence ministry for a Shtil submarine launch.

The tie-in between SumbandilaSat and the cancelled spy satellite is that when Lekota cancelled the latter the Russian defence ministry claimed it was a breach of contract and in retaliation refused to honour the contract it had for SumbandilaSat’s launch. This eventually ended up in Roskosmos agreeing to launch the satellite from its facilities at Baikonur instead. The SumbandilaSat team just happened to be caught up in a situation that they had nothing to do with and no control over.

But yes, the situation with the military surveillance satellite certainly seems to have been botched pretty badly by the SA govt. It would be interesting to find out someday exactly what happened there.