Mandla Maseko: The 'First Black African in Space' Who Never Flew

Mandla Maseko is widely remembered, including in headlines and social media posts that continue to circulate today, as “the first Black African in space.” The claim is not accurate: Maseko never went to space at all, and understanding why requires separating what he actually won from what that win was ultimately supposed to produce.

In 2013, Maseko was one of 23 winners, chosen from roughly a million entrants worldwide, in a competition run by the Axe Apollo Space Academy, a promotional program tied to the Axe deodorant brand rather than any national space agency. The prize was a week of astronaut-style training at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, which Maseko completed in 2015, followed by a planned seat on a Lynx Mark II suborbital spacecraft for a brief flight reaching roughly 100 kilometers in altitude, enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. Maseko’s win made him a genuine celebrity in South Africa, where he became known as an “Afronaut” and spoke publicly, including in school visits, about inspiring young South Africans toward careers in science.

The actual flight never happened. The Lynx spacecraft program behind the prize was postponed indefinitely and ultimately never carried any of the competition’s winners to space, a quiet commercial failure that got far less coverage than Maseko’s initial win had. Maseko continued his work as a public speaker and community advocate for science education in the years that followed, still popularly described in much of that coverage as Africa’s coming “first Black astronaut” despite the program that was meant to make that happen having stalled out. He was killed in a motorcycle crash in Pretoria in July 2019, at age 30, having never flown to space.

The distinction matters because an actual African astronaut already exists, and predates Maseko’s competition win by more than a decade: South African internet entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth paid the Russian space program roughly $20 million to fly aboard Soyuz TM-34 in April 2002, spending eight days aboard the International Space Station conducting experiments before returning to Earth, making him the first African, and only the second private space tourist ever, to reach orbit. Shuttleworth’s flight, unlike Maseko’s cancelled one, actually happened, a distinction that separates a genuine historical first from an aspiration that, however inspiring, was never fulfilled.