“This is my first trip to sub-Saharan Africa”.
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Facebook founder and philanthropist Mark Zuckerberg is in Kenya to meet developers, entrepreneurs and understand the startup environment.
The rocket and the satellite were both lost due to “an anomaly”, SpaceX confirmed, though the root cause of the explosion is not yet known. Facebook will actually be using some space on an Amos 6 satellite that belongs to an Israeli company, Spacecom.
“Some places, there isn’t a good cellphone signal, so we’re launching satellites into space to beam down internet, and we’re building solar-powered planes that can fly over rural areas”, Zuckerberg said.
“Very sad for Kenya there was a time we were the first stop”, tweeted another. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has set out an ambitious target to interconnect people across the globe. “Deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent”.
“To connect people living in remote regions, traditional connectivity infrastructure is often hard and inefficient, so we need to invent new technologies”, he wrote in a Facebook post in October.
Chris Norton says Facebook remains “committed to our mission of connecting people to the Internet around the world”.
Facebook’s Express Wi-Fi is now available in India and Africa.
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Zuckerberg also said that he was able to talk with children at a summer coding camp and entrepreneurs who come to the CcHUB Nigeria to build and launch their apps. Moreover, he declared that the Internet should be a goal for everybody, since it is useful in more than one domain, and that’s why people should think more about connecting the entire world.
