Congolese Aerospace Company Enacts Policy Against Animal Testing

KEKA Aerospace—a private space agency in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—publicly confirmed in a tweet chain that a rat named Kavira died last year “because of a failure” aboard the firm’s Troposphere 5 rocket and that the company “will never use animals in [its] research again,” including for its planned Troposphere 6 rocket launch later this year. The company’s new public policy follows an e-mail from Jean-Patrice Keka—the founder of the Congolese parent company Développement Tous Azimuts (DTA), who has been dubbed the “African Einstein” by the media—to PETA in 2021 announcing “a total ban on the use of animals in DTA’s space experiments” and the sparing of a guinea pig named Galaxionaut, for which PETA awarded Keka its Lifesaver Award.