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We also lamented in the course of our article that despite already functional for few months, the African Space Agency did not have a website and even crime among all for such an organization, it did not sport a logo. To our discontent we learned that AFSA was not in the business of building rockets or satellites. Considering that state of affairs, we proposed that AFSA should be a public relation power house emulating what NASA does for its marketing, considering all proportions of course. If AFSA was not here to implement space programs of its own, at the very least it could become the ultimate space exploration propaganda outlet on the African continent.
As we all learn as human beings, a great journey starts with small steps. That is why those tools, website and logo were primordial to achieve what AFSA intends to be, nothing less than an indispensable influencer and unifier of the politics of the different African space agencies. To illustrate our point of view, we portrayed how the NASA logo was known worldwide among the lambda personae compared to the logos of the other space agencies which are automatically recognized only by the professionals, space cadets or nerds. That is exactly why we wrote back in 2023 that, “… An effective public relations department would campaign and why not invite the youth and the talented people of Africa to design a logo as part of the competition…” As it came to be, we have finally been granted a website and positive news for a logo which we all hope will adequately represent the ambitions of Africa in space.
Before speaking about space exploration and what the title of this article would have led the reader to long for, let’s explore the website of AFSA and let us see how it compares with the other heavy weights of the industry. WHOIS server, (A site which allows you to enquire about the origins and ownership of any website on the World Wide Web.) tells us that the website of AFSA was registered on the name africanspaceagency.org on October 27, 2024, which in itself implies on what date the domain name went live on the internet. It does not however mean that on this day there was an effective AFSA website. But to all intents and purposes, we can consider this date as the birthday of AFSA on the web. WHOIS does not tell us much more and it is quite fair to say that whois gives the approximate same details when it comes to other space agencies whether it is the Indian, Chinese, Russian, American or European ones. As a matter of fact, it would not be fair to run comparative ratings of AFSA against its competitors through the many search engine optimizer tools of the internet, due to the young age of the organization, even so such an exercise could reveal to us flaws that would not be necessarily evident by simply browsing the site. We will not be pedantic for this time leaving the site to mature sufficiently before again attempting the experiment in one year or two. We want to say straight forwardly that in few aspects astonishingly, the AFSA website is actually better than some of its well established counter parts.
We will however be very critical as ‘better in few aspects’ is unfortunately insufficient knowing that AFSA ‘MUST’ excel in marketing and public relations. Understandably, as we pointed earlier, we do not expect AFSA’s website to score very much through SEO tools, it still remains that there are certain basics that have to be met.
From South Africa, searching the word AFSA or A.F.S.A through the Bing engine of Microsoft does not give any relevant results on the space agency until the fourth page where we abandoned the search.
AFSA.org does not give better results. Using Google does not lead either to the agency despite changing your location or using a VPN. To effectively reach the site, one must painstakingly type the words African space agency. Imagine Typing National Aeronautics and Space Administration each time you want to reach NASA’s website. For instance one has only to write ISRO in any search engine to have a flurry of information about the Indian Space Research Organization and that stands for most of the many space agencies of the planet. This is indeed very troubling, as at The International Outsider, one of the means of financing our activities is the design and management of websites and if it is undoubtedly notoriously very difficult to ensure immediate recognition of a new website on the first pages, there are however some tricks that can be applied and which function pretty well, at least at a regional level. And we have to bear in mind that we are speaking about an official organization with continental ambitions supported by not less than 50 African countries.
We have been stunned while investigating on the subject to see that domain name AFSA.com could still be acquired albeit with some negotiations. The domain AFSA.org is definitively taken but AFSA.net is still available. This is a gross mistake for several reasons. If the price tag on AFSA.net can be considered as excessive for a medium size business, it should not however be in any way a cause of budgetary concern for an organization like AFSA. As for the domain AFSA.tv the price is so ridiculously low that it is almost a sin, not to grab it in prevision of the future. The web master/administrator of AFSA could use these sites to redirect towards their main site; they could also just hold these domains without effectively operating them because not doing so can also be very dangerous. A moderately competent IT administrator could even find clever ways to use these domains to optimize the results of the main site on the web. There are other issues that can arise from letting these domains remain available on the market. Some unscrupulous actors could buy them and wait for the moment that the purchase of these domains become of major importance to the African Space Agency, then sell/rent it to them at an overinflated price, not very moral you may argue, but absolutely legal. Something similar happened to us, at the beginning of 2024. The International Outsider lost ownership of interouts.com due to the unfortunate loss of documents during reorganization.
in our case was the company Godaddy which bought the site and attempted to sell it at a whooping 54,000 South African Rand or some 2,963 USD. Fortunately for us we are also in the business, (Which alternatively makes our mistake totally unacceptable) and at the end of the day, we have been able to mitigate the many negative effects that could have affected us with a interouts.com site not controlled by our company on the internet.Ultimately these unfortunate events made much positive free advertising for our newspaper which found its value tripled in a matter of days. It was however, a long run and a very unpleasant experience that we wish to no one, even less to the African Space Agency. And this sort of situation is far from being the worst that can happen. 
Another actor a fraudulent one this time, may acquire these domains and design sites pretending to be associated to the African Space Agency if not squarely cloning the website resulting in scamming an unsuspecting public. It would be irresponsible for the agency not to consider this state of affairs as a matter of concern. The situation is even more complicated for AFSA as it seems that they do not hold the ownership of africanspaceagency.com, this honor comes to the usual suspect Goddady who is willing to let it go for an astronomical price. Africanspaceagency.net and Africanspaceagency.tv are not anymore available, taken hopefully by AFSA.
The website itself is visually pleasant, with header and dropdown covering several subjects and departments. We are then conveyed to a slide show of three images. The first one depicts the premises of the agency in Cairo. We have to admit and we wrote in the past that locating the space agency in Egypt was an excellent choice. Not only because Egypt, an ancient civilization thousands of years old, was religiously and culturally resolutely fascinated by the night sky but also in these modern times, the Space Agency can play a role of unification between the Maghreb and the other countries of the continent. A relation who has not been in the past as we know, as straight forward as one could have wished.
The slide show is unfortunately not interactive, so the user is unable to stop it at will, making it difficult to read the accompanying caption in one shot, tweaking the timer or making the slide interactive would do the trick. The second picture portrays five beautiful and rather young people, with three females in the center of the image and the males on both sides. Behind them are clocks with different time zones (Tokyo, Los Angeles, Sydney etc.), the caption reads Jobs at the African space Agency.
We have multiple issues with this picture. Either the photography was a result of a photo shoot (Habitually expensive) or less probably acquired through stock footage. The intended message is quite clear; working for AFSA in the space industry is modern, appealing and dynamic. No one tells us who are these people, are they working for AFSA? Technicians? Aspiring or working in the space industry? This picture would find a better place in Vogue Magazine rather than occupying such a massif proportion of the Space Agency website. Some people may push back on us arguing that it is only a marketing trick, a technique targeted at the youth and that we should not make a mountain out of it. But there is strictly nothing in this image which speaks about space, showcasing much more how one should be dressed for office work. We would have rather seen some youth interacting with those working in the space industry or anything that relates to the subject. The third picture makes more sense with a satellite (Hopefully an African one) orbiting over Africa carrying the caption; Unifying Africa’s Space Ambitions. 
While hovering over the slide, the user is able to choose if he/she wants to view the site in Arabic, French, and Portuguese with the default being in English. Our question is; where is the translation of the website in Swahili? Obviously, the site could not be translated in all spoken languages of the continent, but Swahili is spoken by 100 million East Africans and is the fourth most spoken language of the continent while Portuguese does not even make the list of the 15 most spoken languages in Africa. There are other problems through the whole site, notably the centering of pictures which sometime overlap the text. The gallery, a visual must (Who said that a picture can say more than a thousand words) is poorly populated. Why not including pictures of the many Birds that several African countries have to this date launched into orbit? Why not pictures of sites, radio telescopes and observatories that are spread out across the many nations of Africa?
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It is incredible that there was only such a weak number of participation for this competition. One must really wonder what happened there...
I wonder If the African Space Agency wants to unify African space ambitions or in fact they want to take credit of acheievements of others!