Mandla Maseko

He was born in Soshanguve, north Pretoria,^[1] to an auto tool maker and a school cleaner.^[2] He was a candidate officer of the South African Air Force,^[2] as well as a private pilot, a DJ, and a biker.^[3]

In 2013 he was one of 23 winners out of a million entrants to a competition^[3] by the Axe Apollo Space Academy^[4] to attend a US space academy, in order to be the first black South African in space. He was nicknamed "Afronaut" and "Spaceboy". He went to the Kennedy Space Center for a week to do tests, such as skydiving and a journey on a reduced-gravity aircraft, ahead of a planned one-hour suborbital flight^[3] on board a XCOR Lynx Mark II^[2] that was planned to take place in 2015. However, the flight did not happen as XCOR Aerospace went bankrupt in 2017.^[3] He would have been the third South African in space, after Mark Shuttleworth in 2002 and Mike Melvill in 2004.^[5]

He died on 6 July 2019 in a motorbike accident, aged 30.^[3]