At 10:04 UTC, before the astonished eyes of those watching the preparations from the beach, the San Marco 2 satellite, Italy’s second satellite, took flight from the Italian launch base off Malindi—the only one in the world in the middle of the ocean. The first Italian satellite had been launched about three years earlier, on December 15, 1964, from the American base on Wallops Island, Virginia; Italy thus became the third country in the world, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to build, launch, and control a satellite with its own personnel.
