“I needed to send in a picture of myself jumping off something. In August 2013, Maseko was lying on the couch when he heard an advertisement for the competition on the radio and decided to enter, along with thousands of other South Africans. “Continue running the race and here’s the title to go with it.” “I have run the race and completed the course, now here is the torch,” Maseko imagined Mandela would have said to him. He heard the news of his achievement on December 5, only a few hours after the death of Nelson Mandela. “If there was a better word than ‘excitement’ I would use it.” He was forced to put his civil engineering studies on hold because he could not pay the fees now will get to experience zero gravity and a journey that normally comes with a $100 000 price tag. “Excitement does not begin to describe how I feel right now,” Maseko told the Pretoria News daily. Shuttleworth is a white entrepreneur and philanthropist who bought a seat on a Russian Soyuz capsule for £12-million and spent eight days on board the International Space Station in 2002. He will be the first black African, and the only other South African besides billionaire Mark Shuttleworth to have gone into space. The son of a toolmaker and a cleaning supervisor, he hails from the dusty Mabopane Township near Pretoria. He saw off a million other entrants to emerge victorious. Handpicked for the trip on the Lynx Mark II Spaceship, Maseko is one of only 23 civilians from around the world to win a seat on the space mission. Maseko won the global Axe Apollo Space Academy competition for an hour long sub-orbital trip of 62 miles, or about 100 kilometres. No-one in Maseko’s family has ever stepped outside South Africa, but now the 25-year-old is preparing to rocket into space in 2015. Like music to Mandla Maseko’s ears, this part-time DJ will blast off into space, literally.
apartheid = political and social system in South Africa of the past blacks and non-whites had to live in separate areas, go to separate schools, restaurants etc.Like music to Mandla Maseko’s ears, this part-time DJ will blast off into space, literally.anniversary = date on which something important happened many years ago.ANC = African National Congress = ruling party in South Africa.
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