The NigeriaSat-2 / NigeriaSat-X programme was contracted in 2006 to Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) of Guildford for US$110 million. Its central deliverable was not the spacecraft but the capacity-building agreement: twenty-five Nigerian engineers, selected from the NASRDA Centre for Satellite Technology Development in Abuja and the Nigerian universities, were embedded at SSTL for the full design, manufacture, integration and test cycle. NigeriaSat-X, the 100 kg secondary spacecraft, was their training project — every subsystem (structure, power, attitude control, on-board data handling, payload electronics) was built by the Nigerian team under SSTL supervision, qualifying the engineers and the spacecraft simultaneously.
The two satellites were launched on 17 August 2011 aboard a Dnepr-1 rocket (a converted SS-18 ICBM) from the Yasny launch base in Orenburg Oblast, Russia, at 07:12 UTC. The primary payload, NigeriaSat-2, was a 300 kg high-resolution Earth-observation spacecraft carrying a 2.5-metre panchromatic / 5-metre multi-spectral imager and a 32-metre wide-swath imager — at the time the highest-resolution civilian imager owned by any African nation. NigeriaSat-X, the Nigerian-built micro-satellite carrying a 22-metre multi-spectral imager, acquired its first image (of Auckland, New Zealand) within three days of launch — a remarkable demonstration of the training programme's success.
Both spacecraft were registered with the ITU and joined the Disaster Monitoring Constellation operated by DMC International Imaging. NigeriaSat-2 imagery has been used for the 2012 Sahel floods response, the Lake Chad surveys, oil-spill mapping in the Niger Delta, and the baseline mapping for the Federal Capital Development Authority master-plan update. The twenty-five engineers who built NigeriaSat-X returned to staff NASRDA's Centre for Satellite Technology Development in Abuja, which is now the design authority for the planned NigeriaSat-3.
NigeriaSat-X is the most significant capacity-building outcome in the history of Nigerian space technology — and the only Nigerian spacecraft ever designed and assembled by Nigerian engineers. The model has been studied by the Ghanaian, Ethiopian and Kenyan space programmes as a template for technology-transfer satellite procurement.