At Nigeria's mission control -- really a small, windowless office lined with desktop computers in the country's capital, Abuja -- 15 aerospace engineers are preparing for a historic moment.
The engineers, many of them recent graduates, will this week begin receiving pictures of Earth beamed from Nigeria's first satellite.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday November 05, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 1 inches; 36 words Type of Material: Correction
Space exploration -- A chart accompanying an Oct. 14 article in Section A about space exploration omitted Japan and a consortium of 15 European nations from a list of countries that have sent a lunar probe.
Nigeria is a country where about 1% of the population has working telephones. Nevertheless, the satellite is "a matter of great national pride," said Solomon Olaniyi, spokesman for Nigeria's nascent National Space Research and Development Agency. While the space event won't quite muster the same attention as a World Cup soccer match, "the nation will be watching," he said.
Since the Columbia space shuttle disaster in February, the U.S. has been engaged in an intense debate over the future of its space program.
But for the majority of the world, space is still considered the ultimate frontier. Leaving the confines of Earth bestows pride and bespeaks technological clout. Satellite launches, almost routine in the U.S., grab headlines and garner live-television coverage elsewhere much the way the first Apollo missions captured Americans' imagination four decades ago.
Dozens of countries are racing to reach space before their neighbors -- or their foes.
Leading the pack is China, which is expected to send an astronaut into orbit this week on the Shenzhou 5, or "Divine Vessel," joining the U.S. and the Russians in an elite club that has enjoyed a monopoly on human spaceflight since the early 1960s.
With the launch, the Chinese hope to begin a quest that even the two world powers long ago abandoned -- eventually constructing a permanent human base on the moon.
India has similar ambitions but will focus on sending unmanned probes, first to the moon and then to explore the solar system. Smaller countries, like South Korea and Pakistan, are trying to enter the fray, setting up space programs with hopes of building rockets and launching them from their own facilities.
More than 50 nations have national space programs, according to the United Nation's Office for Outer Space Affairs.
"Space, at least Earth's orbit, is no longer the exclusive domain of the few," said Howard E. McCurdy, a space historian at American University in Washington, D.C.
Staying on the cutting edge of space exploration, of course, is still enormously expensive. The U.S. spends $15 billion a year funding the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Each shuttle launch costs about $400 million.
