Paper short abstract:

Between histories of environment, technology and development, this paper explores the future-making dimensions of an Italian satellite project in cold war-era Kenya, offering a preliminary assessment of the role (and exclusion) of Kenyan scientists in the production of environmental knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

In April 1967, the cold war space race underway, Italy claimed to be the third country (after the USSR and the USA) to successfully launch a man-made satellite into orbit. Italian engineers did so from Kenyan waters, using a former oil platform in the Indian Ocean, near Malindi, following an agreement between the two states in 1964, just months after Kenya celebrated flag independence. Sparsely populated, equatorial ‘wasteland’ with clear Eastern horizons assumed new commercial and scientific value in the satellite age, while the remote sensing data that satellites produced was intended to have broad ‘developmental’ applications, from agricultural planning and weather forecasting to mineral detection. Fifty years later, on the same site, the Kenyan Space Agency was established.

This paper presents preliminary methodological and theoretical considerations for writing a history of the Kenyan-Italian San Marco space project, based, at this stage, mainly on Italian archives. I will focus on the promises of futurity contained within the apolitical terminology of ‘shared scientific knowledge’ in the agreement, which manifested as commitments to train Kenyan citizens to produce and interpret environmental mapping data. In doing so, I emphasise the ambivalence of satellite technologies in the Anthropocene and explore the African foundations of environmentalism. How did African states relate to the ‘colonisation’ of outer space? How should we understand the presence of Italian engineers and infrastructures on the Swahili coast? How far did the respatialisation of the area around the space station play out in the production and ownership of environmental knowledge?