Sixty years ago – on April 12, 1961 – Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly into space in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR’s) Vostok spacecraft, in a flight lasting 108 minutes, circling Earth for a little more than one orbit.

I deliberately said ‘person’, but for those curious readers, he was indeed a man. Which begs the question: Who was the first woman? It was Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, also from the USSR. On June 16, 1963, in the spacecraft Vostok 6, she completed 48 orbits in a flight lasting 71 hours. This begs the obvious question – no, not what happened to the other four Vostoks, but rather why she stayed away so long.

If you are intrigued by this piece’s title, poyekhali is the word that Gagarin shouted as he took off at 09:07 Moscow time. Translated, the word means “Off we go!”

Turning closer to home, have you ever heard of the South African National Space Agency (Sansa)? It is a government agency that came into being on December 9, 2010, and is responsible for promoting and developing aeronautics and aerospace space research in the country.

But South Africa’s foray into space did not start with the establishment of Sansa; from the 1950s to the 1970s, lunar and interplanetary missions conducted by the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration were supported from a tracking station at Hartebeesthoek, in the Magaliesberg mountain range. It was at Hartebeesthoek that the first images of Mars were received from the Mariner IV spacecraft (launched on November 28, 1964) during its successful flyby of the planet. However, in 1994, work on the development of a launcher and a satellite, which had started in the 1980s, was discontinued.

The operations of Sansa, which employs 65 people, fall into four programme areas. Earth Observation collects, processes, archives and disseminates Earth observation data – principally from satellites – to support policymaking, decision-making, economic growth and sustainable development in South Africa. Space Engineering develops, builds and tests systems and subsystems for satellites. Space Operations provides state-of-the-art and globally competitive ground station facilities and services for global launch activities. Space Science operates a wide range of infrastructure across Southern Africa and in Antarctica, all dedicated to studying Earth’s magnetic field, the sun and the near-space environment.

About 16 000 km north of Hartebeesthoek, in Hawthorne, in the US state of California, you will find another South African venture, which was founded in May 2002. It is Space Exploration Technologies Corp, more commonly known as SpaceX. Founded by South African-born Elon Musk, it employs about 9 500 people and aims to reduce space transport costs to enable the colonisation of Mars. It also manufactures the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, several rocket engines, the Dragon cargo and crew spacecraft and Starlink satellites. Its revenue in 2019 totalled $2-billion.

On January 24, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launched the most satellites into space on a single mission – a total of 143. It would be interesting to hear Sansa’s comparison.

What does Sansa cost South Africa? In September last year, it received an additional R4.47-billion in funding for the next three years to develop the Space Infrastructure Hub, which is part of government’s Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium South Africa initiative. Its allotment for the 2019/20 financial was about R8.2-billion. This equates to about R9.7-billion in yearly government allocations. Given the present dire economic circumstance, can South Africa really afford the luxury of a space agency?

As I put the final touches to this column – on April 18 – Nasa announced that SpaceX had won a $2.9-billion contract to land humans on the moon. It is evident that any endeavours, commercial or otherwise, relating to space are best left to business.