This archive report was first published on 8 July 2019.
On July 6, 2019, tragedy struck when Mandla Maseko, a 30-year-old South African Air Force member, died in a motorbike accident. Maseko had won the chance to be the first black African in space in 2013, beating over one million entrants to secure one of 23 places at a space academy in the US.
Known as Afronaut and Spaceboy, Maseko was a typical township boy from Pretoria who had spent a week at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida doing tests in preparation for an hour-long sub-orbital flight, originally scheduled for 2015.
His dream was to motivate and inspire young people in Africa, proving that they could achieve anything regardless of their background. Maseko had planned to call his family and friends from space, saying, "I hope I have one line that will be used in years to come - like Neil Armstrong did."
Neil Armstrong, the US astronaut who died in 2012 at the age of 82, was the first man to walk on the Moon in 1969. He famously said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
