"We have just received a phone call from Moscow that the launch has been cancelled, maybe due to weather problems or a technical issue. We do not know yet," Joseph Akinyele, a director of Nigeria's Space Research and Development Agency, said on state television.

"I think is better cancelled than taking a risk," said the official.

If the launch had gone ahead, Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, would have been the third country on the continent to have a satellite in orbit, after Algeria and South Africa.

The satellite was to be used for monitoring weather and natural disasters, mapping, territorial surveillance and data gathering according to Science and Technology Minister Turner Isoun.

The remote sensing satellite was to have been launched in Russia on a COSMOS rocket, but mission control and its ground base station are in the Nigerian capital Abuja, the minister said after a cabinet meeting.

He said that 15 Nigerian engineers and scientists have been trained to work on the 13-million-dollar project.

There has been much public debate in Nigeria over the west African country's space programme.

Some commentators ahve argued that fighting disease and poverty would be a better way to spend the country's limited resources, while others see the prestigious project as a step forward in using science to solve Nigeria's ills.

SPACE.WIRE