The National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) was established by Presidential decree on 5 May 1999 and consolidated under the National Space Council chaired by President Olusegun Obasanjo on 4 July 2001. The 25-year National Space Policy, adopted that year, set the launch of an indigenous Earth-observation satellite as its first programme milestone. The contract for NigeriaSat-1 was awarded in November 2001 to Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) of Guildford, United Kingdom — at the time the world's leading micro-satellite house — for US$13 million, with a parallel capacity-building agreement that placed fifteen Nigerian engineers on the SSTL programme team in Guildford for the build cycle.
NigeriaSat-1, a 100 kg micro-satellite carrying a 32-metre ground-resolution multi-spectral imager, was launched on 27 September 2003 aboard a Russian Kosmos-3M rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome at 06:11 UTC, alongside the British DMC-1, Algerian AlSat-1 and Turkish BilSat-1. The four spacecraft formed the operational core of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) coordinated by DMC International Imaging, a UK–Algerian–Nigerian–Turkish joint venture. NigeriaSat-1's first image, of the Niger Delta, was acquired on 19 November 2003.
The satellite was operated from the NASRDA Mission Control Centre at Obasanjo Space Centre, Abuja, and from a back-up at Surrey. Over its mission life NigeriaSat-1 contributed imagery to the international Charter on Space and Major Disasters — notably during Hurricane Katrina (2005), the 2007 Lagos flood, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake — and supplied baseline mapping for the federal land-use survey. Designed for a five-year mission, the spacecraft exceeded its operational life, with formal end-of-mission declared in 2012.
NigeriaSat-1 was the first Nigerian-owned spacecraft, the first West African Earth-observation satellite, and the foundation of Nigeria's subsequent space programme — NigComSat-1 (2007, failed and replaced), NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X (2011) and the still-pending NigeriaSat-3. It remains the largest single capacity-building expenditure on space technology in Nigerian history.