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 north-east of Cape Town. (The location of the Australian antenna has still to be determined.)
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