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Sheriff here!

This week, I have a word for you: “moonshot”.

It means an ambitious, groundbreaking, or risky project that tackles a massive problem and aims for a radical, exponential solution.

The history of progress in the world has been defined by moonshots in tech, industry, and politics.

This week, we’ll explore that history and how it affects Africa.

Let’s get into it.

He promised that the US would put a man on the moon before 1972. 

At that point, the entire US space program had only put one man on a 15-minute suborbital flight. 

The integrated circuit, the tech today’s computers are built on, had just been invented three years earlier and barely existed outside a few research labs.   

And computers were still the size of bedrooms. 

Yet, JFK stood in front of the American public and made that pledge.

Seven years later, in 1969, Neil Armstrong, an American astronaut, became the first person to set foot on the moon.

This is what a moonshot looks like, no pun intended.

It’s a goal so improbable that merely attempting seems silly and unintelligent.

But throughout history, moonshots have produced stellar results.

They’ve created monumental inventions, created massive pools of talent, and moved entire countries forward.

Now, the conversation around Africa’s development has often revolved around the basics: food security, housing, health, and education.

These are the necessary scaffolds for a country to compete at all.

To make a great leap forward, though, countries need a moonshot. 

But not every mad goal qualifies as a moonshot.

A moonshot typically has three qualities:

That last bit is really important, and it’s where all the gains are felt.

When we examine history, we see that for most countries, a giant leap forward comes through moonshots.

In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. It sent the US government into a frenzy.

A year later, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, pouring federal money into science and math classrooms. 

Between 1960 and 1970, the American college population almost doubled. 

The kids who came up through that pipeline went on to build Intel, ARPANET, and most of what we now call Silicon Valley.

Then came the Apollo Missions,  the series of rocket launches that eventually landed a man on the moon. 

A whole generation of kids watched the moon landing on grainy television and decided to become scientists. 

They are now called the Apollo babies. 

They built the early biotech industry, the personal computer, and a lot of the software you use every day.

Jeff Bezos has said that watching the moon landing as a kid inspired him to start Blue Origin, his space exploration company.

Sixty years later, India ran the same play. 

ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission, Mangalyaan, reached Mars on its first attempt in 2014 for $74 million, which is less than the cost of making the Hollywood film Gravity. 

In 2023, Chandrayaan-3 became the first spacecraft to land on the moon's south pole. 

India now has more than 180 space startups, and the country's space economy is on track to reach $44 billion within a decade. 

ISRO is producing the kind of engineering talent India never had at scale before, and you can draw a straight line from a moon landing to a new generation of Indian founders.

But besides helping build huge but niche industries…

Moonshots can build entire countries.

In 1960, South Korea's GDP per capita was around $158. That was lower than Ghana's at the time. 

The country had almost no paved roads, no real industry, and an economy held up by US aid and rice farming.

Then President Park Chung-hee made the bet. 

In 1968, his government founded the Pohang Iron and Steel Company, or POSCO, on a windswept beach with money pulled from Japanese war reparations. 

The World Bank refused to fund it. They said a country at Korea's level had no business building an integrated steel mill.

Today, South Korea's GDP per capita is around $34,000. POSCO is one of the largest steel producers in the world. 

Steel from Pohang built the ships at Hyundai, the cars at Kia, and the foundations of every Samsung factory.

Japan did the same with the Shinkansen, its first bullet train system. 

The bullet train was finished in 1964, in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and it came in at double its budget. 

Critics called it a billion-dollar white elephant on opening day. 

Today, it carries over 160 million passengers a year on the Tokyo line alone, and it gave the world high-speed rail. 

It also reset the country's economic geography by turning Tokyo and Osaka into a same-day commute, which created new regional industries along the line. 

The UAE did it with the Hope Probe, which reached Mars in 2021 for around $200 million and trained 150 Emirati engineers who otherwise would have been doing something else.

Time and again, moonshots have produced incredible results that outlive the purpose they were created for.

But it’s also worth asking why they’re so effective.

When most goals are set, whether by people, companies, or governments, the idea is to apply direct effort, inputs, and resources to achieve them.

This is a push strategy. Moonshots work in reverse.

The best moonshots are effective because they pull together five things that rarely move together in most countries.

The first is talent. 

The Apollo Program employed 400,000 people at its peak.

ISRO trained a generation that now staffs India's private space companies. POSCO's founder Park Tae-joon, famously said you can import machines, but you cannot import people.

The second is infrastructure. 

The Shinkansen rewired Japan's economic geography. Morocco's Noor solar complex laid the backbone of a new grid that now powers over a million homes.

The third is capital. 

Big national bets pull in big money that funds different industries. 

Between 1962 and 1967, Apollo was buying 60 percent of every integrated circuit produced in the United States. That demand is what funded Fairchild, Intel, and the rest of Silicon Valley in its earliest days.

The fourth is know-how. 

The Concorde was a commercial disaster. Only twenty of them ever flew. 

But the cross-border aerospace partnership behind it later produced Airbus, which today employs over 150,000 people and is one of the two companies building the planes the world flies on.

The fifth is jobs. 

POSCO turned a fishing port of 30,000 into an industrial city of half a million.

So, even when the official goal is to get to the moon. 

The real value is the talent, infrastructure, capital, know-how, and jobs that get built on the way there.

And that’s often the whole point.

Here is the part most people miss. 

Africa has actually pulled off moonshots before. The problem is not that the continent has never made big bets, but that it stopped making them.

In 1945, Haile Selassie decided that newly liberated Ethiopia needed a global airline. 

Not a regional carrier. A global one. 

The country had just emerged from Italian occupation. There were no Ethiopian pilots and no aviation industry to speak of. 

He bought five Douglas DC-3s, brought in TWA as a technical partner, and started flying the following year. 

By 1971, the airline was run entirely by Ethiopians. 

Today, Ethiopian Airlines is Africa's largest carrier, flies to 155 destinations, owns stakes in five other African airlines, and runs the continent's biggest pilot training academy.

In 2001, Nigeria had around 400,000 phone lines for 120 million people. 

Ten million Nigerians were on NITEL's waiting list, with two-year delays for connections that often never came. 

Obasanjo's government cancelled the 34 existing telecom licences, set up the world's first ascending clock auction for spectrum, and broadcast it live. 

Three GSM licences were sold for $285 million each, raising $855 million in a week. 

Today, Nigeria has 226 million mobile subscribers. 

In 2011, Ethiopia decided to build the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa. 

International financiers refused to fund it because Egypt was lobbying against it. 

So Ethiopia funded the $5 billion project itself, with bonds, diaspora donations, and salary contributions from its own civil servants. 

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam was inaugurated in September 2025. Its installed capacity of 5.15 GW more than doubles Ethiopia's national power generation.

Three eras, three financing models, three bets called impossible. 

All three pulled in talent, infrastructure, capital, know-how, and jobs at national scale. And they paid off massively.

Ethiopia now has a national carrier with global acclaim.

And Nigeria is one of Africa’s biggest tech hubs.

The point of moonshot isn’t really about getting to the moon. It’s about the side effects.

As the story goes, it’s about all the friends made along the way.

The jobs, infrastructure, talent, and know-how that are spun up in the process.

The question isn’t whether Africa has what it takes to pull off moonshots; it does.

It’s about whether it’ll keep making them.

What’s the coolest African moonshots story you know?

Tell me here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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