The South African National Space Agency (Sansa) will play a crucial supporting role in the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa’s) Artemis crewed lunar (and beyond) exploration programme. Sansa will host one of three Nasa Lunar Exploration Ground Sites (LEGS) communication antennas, at a new facility to be built at a new site.

The network of LEGS antennas will ensure that Artemis mission control will remain in constant contact with Artemis missions in space and on the Moon, up to a range of two-million kilometres (for missions far beyond the Moon). These antennas will have a diameter of from 18 m to 24 m. One will be based in the US (at the White Sands complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico), and one each in South Africa and Australia. The South African antenna will be located at a new Sansa facility, to be set up at Matjiesfontein, in the Western Cape province, some 240 km northeast of Cape Town. (The location of the Australian antenna has still to be determined.)

“Location, weather and existing infrastructure make Matjiesfontein the ideal place to build this antenna,” explained Nasa deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation Badri Younes. “We really couldn’t have asked for a better spot on Earth than here in South Africa, with whom we first partnered six decades ago to land the first humans on the lunar surface.”

As Younes noted, during the early 1960s Nasa constructed a spacecraft tracking station in South Africa (at Hartebeesthoek, west of Pretoria; it is now a radio telescope) and South Africa provided communications support for a series of Nasa missions, including Apollo crewed missions to the Moon. Now South Africa is resuming that role, for the Artemis programme. (In Greek mythology, Artemis was the sister of Apollo.) Artemis will land the first woman, and the first person of colour, on the Moon.

The new partnership has been formalised by the signing of a Letter of Intent between South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and Nasa, at Matjiesfontein, on Tuesday. Sansa and Nasa representatives then ceremonially broke the ground, to mark the start of construction of the new communications facility.

“We see this partnership as mutually beneficial,” highlighted DSI director-general Dr Phil Mjwara. “Matjiesfontein ground station will alleviate increased demand for Nasa’s Deep Space Network, allowing Artemis to meet its goals and expand our scientific knowledge of key challenges to astronaut health and safety, such as space radiation, altered gravity fields, isolation and confinement, closed environments, and extreme and prolonged distance from Earth.”