As Jeff Bezos spends his astronomical wealth to leave Earth on his rocket, Egypt is stepping up its own efforts with a delve into the final frontier as it announces it will launch two satellites into space by 2022.

Egypt’s Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, announced the mission during the Europe-Africa Space Earth Observation High-Level Forum, and revealed that the first of the two satellites, NExSat-1, will be a lightweight vessel used for scientific research. They will also launch a second lightweight craft - although ‘lightweight; in space context means 330 kilograms - which will be used to take photographs with a crisp accuracy of two metres from space. So, smile! You’re on camera.

Both satellites will serve remote sensing purposes, which essentially entails detecting and monitoring an area’s physical elements through special cameras and radiation-measurements. The technologies enable the enriching of knowledge in a range of scientific fields, including geography and geology, which can boil down to something like identifying changes in temperature in oceans and tracking city growth or agricultural land evolution over years or decades in a more comprehensive manner than would be possible from the ground.

Abdel Ghaffar also announced that Egypt will host the headquarters of the African Space Agency, with the Egyptian Space Agency to support space research throughout the continent.

“We aim to transform Egypt into a centre for training, research, and development in space activities,” Abdel Ghaffar said. The wider mission involves encouraging African youth to engage in space sciences, and prepare them for the development of emerging technologies. These technologies - which include using satellite images to support projects on the ground - are hoped to stimulate Africa’s agriculture, and to develop social and economic innovation for all Africans.