How the revolution led to closure of NASA's tracking station in Zanzibar
The rusting remains of a former American satellite tracking station, pictured in 2004, located about 15 kilometres east of Stone Town near the village of Tunguu. PHOTO | COURTESY
Zanzibar. Beneath the rusting sheet-metal structures in Tunguu and the now-farmed fields of Chwaka lies a forgotten but charged chapter in global space history—one that ended not with technological failure, but with political revolution.
By April 1964, just three years after it became operational, the Zanzibar node of NASA’s Project Mercury — once hailed as a vital “lifeline” in America’s space race — was shut down and dismantled at the insistence of the newly established revolutionary government led by President Abeid Amani Karume.
