It’s not an email scam, people, Nigeria really is sending an astronaut into space

This week, Nigeria said it would send an astronaut into space by the year 2030. The news was not, as you may have suspected, an update of a widely circulated scam on Facebook which claimed a Nigerian astronaut was lost in space. Instead Nigeria’s science and technology minister Ogbonnaya Onu said Nigeria would join the growing league of space faring nations, which now includes India, China, Japan, Canada, Russia, the United States, and the 22 member states of the European Space Agency. As an author who has written about the Nigerian space program in fact and in fiction, two strange aspects of this announcement struck me. The first is that, technically, Nigeria already sent a person into space. More

(Source: Quartz - Mar 28)