If ever the predictions launched a few days ago by the father of Artificial Intelligence Elon Musk were true, it could be Malindi who warns him (and warns us) of the imminent end of the world.
Let's explain better: SpaceX's proprietary technological tycoon, speaking at the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence, alongside another technology tycoon, Jack Ma, said that there's a good chance that in the near future something unpleasant could happen to Earth ... if not a little apocalypse is missing and announced that he will speed up the implementation of his studies on interplanetary flights, to prepare to land on Mars.
The eccentricity but also the genius of Musk are now recognized worldwide, what almost nobody knows is that some of the space data that SpaceX uses to study the cosmos are transmitted by the Italian Space Center Luigi Broglio of Ngomeni, a stone's throw from Malindi, better known as St. Mark's Base.
Here about fifteen Italian technicians work together with 189 Kenyans (with various tasks) and collect data through mega antennas that decrypt the passing satellites on this part of the hemisphere, from a privileged and almost unique position thanks to the proximity to the Equator, as per the happy intuition of Prof. Broglio who in 1964 thought of Malindi as an ideal location for the first Italian launch space base, from which the third satellite in human history was placed in orbit, after the Soviet and American one.
In addition to the millions of data sent daily to the centres of the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency, as well as to the Kenyan Government, for some years now the "Base" has decided to make its technologies and capabilities available to other "space actors".
Taking this opportunity, among others, Elon Musk and his SpaceX have also relied on Italian-Kenyan reliability.
"We must point out that the data transmitted by the satellites in orbit on behalf of SpaceX are received by us and transmitted to the American company as they are - explains Francesco Dominici, Mission Manager of the Space Centre Luigi Broglio - their server as well as protected and secret, has a camera that checks that no kind of manipulation takes place.
The fact remains that one of the SpaceX orbital research databases and probably also the data related to the possible journey of SpaceX's Red Dragon Starship on Mars, arrive from Malindi, thanks to us Italians.
Clearly SpaceX isn't the only important company to rely on the Ngomeni Base to capture information in space. So much so that the Center has equipped itself with a new large avant-garde antenna (with a parabola of 13 meters in diameter) that is almost ready to be operational, joining the other two pre-existing ones, which, well maintained, will continue to do their duty for a few more years.
But we will talk about this in the near future.