Kuwait has successfully launched the first satellite, “KuwaitSat 1”, into space via a missile from a base in the US state of Florida, the Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) reported.
The Kuwaiti satellite was launched on Tuesday, January 3, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida, USA.
KUNA stated that “it was confirmed that the information and ground image reception station in the northern building of the College of Science at Kuwait University was ready to pick up the signals of KuwaitSat 1 after it reached its orbit around the Earth.”
This satellite launched under the slogan Kuwait to Space, and it is a project of Kuwait University, funded by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, and work on it continued for 3 years with two young Kuwaiti teams.
As per a report by Anadolu Agency, the cost of the project amounted to 316,000 Kuwaiti Dinars (Rs 8,51,13,109), and 67 members of various degrees and scientific specializations (67 per cent female and 33 per cent male) worked for it, with a number of continuous working hours that exceeded a thousand.
This is the second mission to space announced by a Gulf country in less than a month.
On December 11, the UAE announced the launch of the Rashid Rover to the surface of the moon on a five-month mission to study the properties of the soil on the surface of the moon, the rocks and geology of the moon, and the movement of dust and plasma.
