The Space Review: Latin America’s space programs in 2012 Comments

Eduardo M

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 03:45:32 +0000

I do recall the name of the animal ,it was Juan , an small monkey with a weight of about one and a half kilos ,the rocket a Castor/Orion ,they reached an altituded of 375 km and returned safe to earth , Juan finish his days in the Prov. of Cordoba Zoo.I believe this event took place around 1987/89 ,way before the goverment of Saul Menem momentarily deactivated the space reserch program in Argentina.

Eduardo M

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 03:09:53 +0000

who are you Mr.Alex Sanches ?.... if you are going to write an article about satellites ,rockets and launching capabilities first thing you should do is to get up to date with current developments related to that subject in Argentina and Brasil ; both countries are scheduled to launch their own satellites in the next two years (2014/15 with theirs own space inyectors).

baldusi

Thu, 6 Sep 2012 22:05:01 +0000

Argentina's INVAP is also in the final testings of it's first GSO craft, the ARSAT-1 (launch in 2013), the ARSAT-2 (2014) and ARSAT-3 (2015) will be launched after. And the duo SAR satellites SAOCOM-1A/B are being actively developed. They have just inaugurated their shaker, vacuum chamber and achroic chamber for 4.6m satellites. And they are working on the payload for the Barzilian-Argentinian Sabiamar. MSL also had an Argentinian on the EML team, Miguel San Martín. Brazil has a very active sounding rocket program, and are developing two fully indigenous small LV (VLS amd VLM) plus the Ukranian Cyclone-4 project. They have a program of Earth observation satellites with China, the CBERS, and a program to put quite a few GSO satellites. In fact, that is a plan that will go from almost all developed outside to fully indigenous development. They also have a very healthy methane engines program.

Alejandro Chavarri

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:34:52 +0000

It is a good article in general, but it barely has information regarding space programs in Mexico and Central America. Regarding Mexico the author could have mentioned the MEXSAT satellite program as well as the newly created Mexican Space Agency. It would also make it a more interresting article if it would mention the countries that have offical space agencies or departments in Latin America.

hmmmWell

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:08:09 +0000

This was the market that SpaceX's Elon Musk had in mind when he talked about using his soon to be man-rated Dragon Capsule as space transport for other countries trying to develope a manned space program.

Nico

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 22:53:03 +0000

Brazil builds its own rockets. The NDX-1 space suit tested by Nasa was designed by the Argentine aerospace engineer Pablo de Leon. Also, Argentina is developing satallite launching capability and it was the 4th country in the world to send an animal to space.

D. Messier

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 18:25:29 +0000

I was surprised by the lack of discussion of Brazil's launcher ambitions. Construction of the Cyclone-4 launch facilities at Alcantara has been on-going for months. Brazil is moving ahead with development of VLS-1 for small satellite launches. And a family of Angara-derived launchers remain a future possibility. If they actually bring these projects to fruition and South America does create a space agency, then Alcantara could become a formidable rival to Kourou. It's got an equatorial location going for it.

Greg Zsidisin

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:17:10 +0000

Very surprising that there's no mention of Brazil's partnership with Ukraine to develop the Alcantara site into a commercial satellite launch facility, using a upgraded version of Ukraine's venerable Tsyklon (Cyclone) rocket. While not an entirely indigenous program, Brazil is nevertheless half of the partnership, making use of its near-Equatorial site. The program has been on a slow burn for a decade, but current projections have the first flight in 2013-14. There has also been discussion of bringing Russia's Angara launcher family to Brazil, which the author does mention in his cited 2008 article). Just last year, TSR ran a brief article by Doug Messier focused on these launcher developments: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1904/1 See also: http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/first-lau... http://kosmosdirectives.com/news120604.html http://www.parabolicarc.com/2011/09/06/brazil-the... And finally: http://english.ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/36564197/5... (Love the little one-upmanship in the last sentence...)