South Africa's Space Heritage: the hidden decade of the 1980s

摘要

South Africa's most spectacular space-related project before the SKA bid was the missile and space launcher project of the 1980s. The challenge for space historians is that this military project was throughout its life cycle under total censorship. Even today, with no possibility of prosecution, the space engineers do not publically talk about it. After South Africa became a democracy, various brief accounts have appeared in the public domain, but they are problematic in at least three ways. First, they focus on the atom bomb project, devoting only a few pages, or even only paragraphs, to the RSA-3, as merely a future delivery mode for the A-bomb. Second, the published accounts focus on what Israelis did in South Africa, instead of what the South Africans did in South Africa. Third, rather than making the most probable deductions, many accounts compete to be more sensationalist than their commercial rivals. Space historians may take heart from the fact that this situation is no different to that which confronted authors at the start of research into Peenemunde, Tyutatam, and Jiuquan. This paper probes all literature and brochures in the public domain for contradictions, and for independent confirmations. This also requires analyzing if one publication is a derivative of another.