The galaxionauts

This film follows the incredible adventure of the Congolese space program. A film immersion, several years before D-Day, accompanies this project led by Kekaerospace and its director, Jean-Patrice Keka. The available means can seem incongruous and even make you smile, as they are so derisory: home-made fuel, electronics recovered from old televisions in dumps and fuselage elements in powdered milk boxes. Not forgetting the fact that the previous launch in 2009, which was supposed to reach an altitude of 35 km, ended in an explosion almost on the ground. But Keka and his team are amazing. Inventive field engineers, they are active in fields as diverse as the manufacture of microscopes for blood tests in the bush, amplification systems for music or wreck recovery in the Congo River. One of their first rockets still reached an altitude of 15 km. The programme that they have set themselves is full of common sense, in correlation with the means at their disposal, and animated by a fresh and healthy energy in our somewhat disillusioned world. Their enthusiasm and fervour are communicative and one begins to hope that they will succeed in their crazy bet. While the systematic plundering of Congo’s natural resources continues to cause one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in history, this film is a fable showing a different Africa, far from Ebola and the guerrillas. And even if one feels its distant and widespread presence, notably through the corruption problems of which Keka and his team are victims, one begins to dream that one day they will succeed in sending the first Congolese into space, which he has already named Galaxionaute…