Totally Spaced Out

Discovering Zanzibar’s intergalactic connection

A space tracking station in the midst of Zanzibar helped America to land on the moon. The remains are still there – and one woman keeps star-gazing alive on the isle.

You may know a few things about Zanzibar but one story is almost too spaced out to be true: Zanzibar’s intergalactic connection. The island had a space station run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) for almost four years in the early sixties. One of only 16 stations worldwide along the Earth’s orbital track, it was vital in getting the first manned spacecraft into orbit, and to eventually land Apollo 11 on the moon on 20 July 1969.

However, when Neil Armstrong made his “one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind”, the Nasa ground station near the village of Tunguu was already abandoned and closed. In 1964, incited by fierce protests in Stone Town, the new communist-leaning rulers of Zanzibar had made it sufficiently clear, that the US station was to close down and the crew and their families – exactly 91 Americans – had to leave the island immediately. Even the New York Times reported about it on 8 April 1964.

Few people nowadays know about the station and less where it is located. “On my way to the east coast we tried once to visit the remains of it”, recalls Faye Richardson: “We didn’t find much.” But for any space activities of the present – especially when the International Space Station (ISS) is crossing the sky over Zanzibar – one can hundred per cent count on the 71-year-old star gazer to post an alert on the island residents chat group ‘Wanawatu’ .

Hey star gazers!

“Hey Star Gazers”, read a typical post of hers on 8 September 2023, “the International Space Station will be passing over tonight for 6 minutes starting at 7:10 pm. Start looking in the southwest direction for the light travelling across the sky towards the northeast.” How many people on the island would follow such advice? There’s no space-watching society in Zanzibar nor a spaceport like the Luigi Broglio Space Center (BSC) ocean platform in Malindi in Kenya, but on an island still widely free of light pollution, dramatic, star-studded night skies are definitely watched by quite a few private gazers. “Especially over the sea, in clear nights, one can identify all the big star signs with bare eyes”, says Pete Hummonds, a frequent visitor to Zanzibar. Clever apps (Startracker3D, Star Tracker Life) help identifying them nowadays.

Only a few decades ago, no app and no internet were available. And yet, the Zanzibar space station with an aluminium storage house, electronic equipment, cooling towers, generators and, most importantly, an intercom system was “part of the first real-time global communication system ever built”, according to the website zanzibarhistory.org with photos and memories of the time.

Before the internet there was Mercury

”Before the internet there was Project Mercury” says American journalist Amanda Lichtenstein in her feature about the Zanzibar station published in 2019 on the media platform ‘Global Voices’. “Communication between the space station and astronauts was a highly orchestrated dance”, she writes.

But why was the station there in the first place? In case astronauts became incapacitated, there were “never to be more than ten minutes flying time between controls from the ground”, Nasa had decided. 16 stations were positioned from Cape Canaveral to Nigeria, from Zanzibar to Mexico. The Sultan of Zanzibar at the time and the British protectorate leaders were huge fans of the project Mercury. Americans crews loved the island because they could bring their families on the assignment

Zanzibar youth was also intrigued by “the high-tech equipment and the reach-for-the-stars attitude. They learned about the schedules and would lay on the beach looking up waiting for the American spaceship to pass overhead”, recounts Torrence Royer, whose father worked with Mercury. Another young boy born in Zanzibar in 1946 was equally fascinated by project Mercury – Farrokh Bulsara who, as a rock legend, changed his name to Freddie Mercury!

Moon walks in Mbweni

When Faye Richardson, born under desert skies in Utah, arrived in Zanzibar in 1991 as a nurse practitioner with the UK agency Save the children, “it was still socialist”, she recalls: “The ferry was owned by Russians, and the USSR embassy located next to the State House.” In 32 years on the island she has seen many changes. She married the late American entrepreneur Tom Green in 2005, who had famously opened the first hotel in Stone Town with his partner Emerson Skeens. She ran a successful art film club until Corona – but one constant in her life have been the night skies over Zanzibar, she says. She loves to “go on moon walks” from her garden bungalow in Mbweni.

As a monsoon storms rises, nature-loving Faye locks up her turkeys and calls her cats in. it’s time for one last question: When has she last seen the – still active – ISS passing over the island, stuck in its orbital track as fixated by project Mercury in the 60s? “Eight to nine years ago” she says, “it was so clearly visible it looked like a shiny tin can moving across the sky.”

Space discoveries

Spot the ISS from Zanzibar: spotthestation.nasa.gov/

Historical information: www.zanzibarhistory.org