DaveLabs has begun a space launch feasibility analysis, and is opening research into space technologies
Godswill Iyke Dave
DaveLabs has begun a space launch feasibility analysis, and is opening a standing research track in space technologies. Both were announced from the stage at Horizon Summer '26.
What was announced
Two things, and it is worth separating them. The first is a research track: DaveLabs is now working on space technologies as a standing line of work, alongside the AI research that produced Amaka AI and Optiq Studio. The second is a specific piece of work already under way — a feasibility analysis of orbital launch from The Gambia.
A feasibility analysis is a study. It is not a launch date, a vehicle, or a promise of one. What it produces is an honest answer to a question nobody in the region has formally asked: what would it actually take, and is the answer viable?
What the analysis covers
- Site and range. Candidate sites, the geography of the coastline, and which orbits are reachable safely from a country at roughly thirteen degrees north.
- Regulatory groundwork. What national space law, licensing and treaty obligations a launching state carries, and what The Gambia would need in place first.
- Ground segment. Tracking, telemetry and control — the part of a space programme that has to exist before anything is worth launching.
- People. The engineering skills pipeline required to sustain any of it beyond a single demonstration.
Why this sits inside a research company
Earlier in the same broadcast we said DaveLabs is a research company, built on three pillars — solving systemic crises, sovereign West African intelligence, and radical democratisation. The second pillar has always extended past software. Launch capability is the furthest edge of it, and the point of naming it publicly is to be held to it.
We work backwards from problems, not forwards from technology. The question is not whether a launch site in The Gambia sounds ambitious. The question is what the analysis says.
What happens next
The analysis runs first. We will publish what it finds — including a negative result, which is a real possibility and a useful one. Research updates will appear here as the work produces them.
Research enquiries: research@davelabs.co. Press: press@davelabs.co.
