What Türkiye and Somalia Are Building at Warsheikh

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n October 9, at the International Astronautical Congress in Antalya, Industry and Technology Minister Mehmet Fatih Kacır said Türkiye was building a launch site in Somalia for its own rockets and missiles and for the growing world demand for launches.

Reports of possible missile testing at the site had surfaced months earlier, but this time a minister was speaking in public. Somalia supplies the land, and much of what the deal means for both countries will be settled long before anything leaves the pad.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had confirmed four days earlier that construction was under way, and described it as a contribution to Africa’s space ecosystem. Kacır announced the completion of feasibility and design work in December 2025, and in Antalya he described the site as a very large area allocated to Türkiye. It belongs to Türkiye’s National Space Program, whose aim is to launch vehicles developed in Türkiye, and no date has yet been given for the first launch from Somali soil.

Türkiye’s relationship with Somalia grew closer during the 2011 famine and now runs through military training, maritime security and offshore energy exploration. The spaceport takes that cooperation into commercial launches, a business neither country has yet operated.

Somalia’s government has welcomed the project. What it has agreed to on land use, commercial revenue and oversight has not been published.

A coast close to the equator

Warsheikh sits about 2.3 degrees north of the equator. Europe’s spaceport at Kourou, in French Guiana, lies at roughly five degrees. A rocket flying east into a low-inclination orbit picks up speed from the Earth’s rotation and needs less energy to get there, and from Somalia’s eastern shore the flight path heads straight out over the Indian Ocean.

Kacır said the feasibility studies had ranked Somalia as the most favorable location, and pointed to cost as well: an equatorial launch, he said, can run about 30 percent cheaper than a comparable one from Türkiye.

He also set a target in Antalya. A 400-kilogram Turkish satellite is to reach a 550-kilometer orbit aboard the domestically developed Şimşek-1 by the end of 2027. Whether that mission will fly from Somalia, he did not say. The 2027 target gives the launcher a timetable. The Somali facility has no comparable public deadline.

Finding buyers is another matter. African governments have so far purchased launches abroad, from India, China, Europe and the United States. Their combined space budgets rose to $828 million in 2026 from $627 million a year earlier, although much of that money is tied to satellites, observatories and ground infrastructure.

A working spaceport on the continent would still give African operators one more option, if its prices and reliability can compete with established providers.

Ankara is looking further afield as well. Arif Karabeyoğlu, a board member of the Turkish Space Agency, said at the congress that the spaceport would serve global operators as well as Turkish vehicles. Turning that intention into contracts requires a safety record the facility has yet to build.

From Malindi to Alcântara

Somalia would not be the first African state to host a launch site run by a foreign partner. In 1967 Italy began sending satellites into orbit from platforms off the Kenyan coast near Malindi. Nine had gone up by 1988, when the launches stopped, although the ground installations stayed in use.

Kenya and Italy renegotiated the arrangement for the Luigi Broglio Space Centre in 2016, and the new agreement took effect in 2020. It provides for an annual land-use payment starting at $250,000, with a $50,000 increase every five years.

Kenya is entitled to half the profits from commercial services sold to third parties, has a role in managing the facility and retains authority over launch approvals. Yet in 2023 Kenya’s defense minister, Aden Duale, told a parliamentary committee that Kenyans had yet to see significant tangible benefits. The center, the committee heard, had been reluctant to disclose its commercial activities in full.

At Alcântara, in Brazil, the trouble lay on land. Quilombola communities displaced by the space program have contested the area for decades. Brazil signed its 2019 safeguards agreement with Washington while the dispute was still open, and only in September 2024 did a settlement clear the way for land titles.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled on the case two months later, in a judgment covering 171 communities. Some 45,900 hectares were titled in March 2026, although other parts of the settlement remain unfinished. Around Warsheikh, the people who live and fish along the coast will have their own questions about access to land and sea once launches begin.