Fact-Check — Why are Nasa planes flying around the Western Cape? The reason is much less sinister than you think

The viral video is set to a particular suspenseful music soundtrack which is often used on TikTok to signal that the content you’re about to see explores some kind of alarming conspiracy or unexplained mystery. And indeed, in the comments on this video, you will see hundreds and hundreds of South Africans speculating about the reason Nasa is apparently circling South Africa’s airspace.

In particular, people are very keen to link these mysterious flights to the weather, and to the phenomenon of “cloud seeding”. To quote one commenter “Makes sense: cloud seeding. No wonder we have had violent storms that caused maximum damage”.



Two things. Firstly, cloud seeding does exist, and has been undertaken in South Africa in the past. What it basically refers to is injecting clouds with chemicals in order to induce rain, which could obviously be very helpful in cases of drought, though there’s actually relatively little evidence to suggest that it really works. But cloud seeding has become a preoccupation of conspiracy theorists who believe that the world’s governments are routinely manipulating the weather as part of a secret programme. That brings me to the second point.

Read more: Nasa turns its gaze from space to the Western and Eastern Cape in new biodiversity project

The changes in weather and climate patterns around the world in recent years have been so alarming that in a way it’s quite understandable that people would rather ascribe these shifts to sinister actions on the part of shadowy authorities rather than confront the reality of our looming climate catastrophe.

But in the case of Nasa flying over South Africa, let’s just all relax. Nasa is not here for cloud seeding, or experiments on unwitting South African participants, or anything else you’ll read in the comments section. Neither is it some kind of secret that Nasa is here.

Nasa is here as part of a biodiversity monitoring survey called Bioscape which has been a couple of years in the making. The Nasa planes are gathering data which will be combined with satellite intel and observations from the ground to grow our understanding of floral diversity in the Western Cape. It’s a major project drawing in a number of universities in the US and South Africa and it’s pretty cool. 

So no, the DA has not “sold Western Cape airspace to Nasa for weather modification”. We have enough real stuff to worry about — let’s take that one off our plate. DM