Jair Bolsonaro opening doors to Brazil for U.S. Space Industry

The Trump Administration has just seen with great satisfaction how the government of President Jair Bolsonaro has cleared the last two remaining obstacles for its powerful space industry to penetrate Brazil in a preferential manner and with the maximum guarantees. The two decisive steps that have just been taken by the authorities in Brasilia leave the way open for the implementation of the Technology Safeguards Agreement, a commitment signed in Washington a year ago by Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump and which has already been ratified by the respective legislatures. 

The bilateral agreement is a privilege that the United States grants to Brazil to put into orbit rockets, spacecrafts or satellites carrying on board technological components, equipment or systems with U.S. patents considered critical. In return, the Brasilia authorities undertake to guarantee the protection of the American technology housed in the space devices to be deployed in its facilities and to establish the active and passive measures necessary to prevent espionage, theft or copying.

The final steps towards the implementation of the Agreement represent a major qualitative leap for large space corporations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin or SpaceX, but also for medium and small companies in the sector, to obtain official concessions to operate from the privileged and little-known Brazilian military space base at Alcantara. 

Located in the extreme north of the state of Maranhão, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, the Alcantara complex is considered to be world’s best located, since its proximity to the Equator allows for much cheaper and efficient take-offs than from any other point.  

The first obstacle removed by the Brazilian authorities means that from now on only the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) and not the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB) will assume the final responsibility for all launch campaigns at Alcantara. This way, the Space Force created by Donald Trump at the end of 2019 will be able to ensure operations in the Carioca country and relate directly to the Brazilian airmen.  

In mid-May, the president of the AEB, Air Force Colonel Carlos Augusto Teixeira de Moura, and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Air Force Lieutenant General Carlos Augusto Amaral Oliveira, signed an agreement establishing a division of duties between the two institutions. The pact determines that the AEB effectively transfers to the military aviators the responsibility of formalizing contracts with national or foreign companies accepted to carry out rocket operation and launch operations. 

Only the administrative processes of information, initial negotiation, licensing and authorisation for flights into space and associated activities remain in the hands of the Agency. The AEB has just started this process, and less than ten days ago it opened the call for tenders for national or foreign companies to express their interest in obtaining concessions to use the Alcantara space centre. 

A military base managed until now by the AEB, Alcantara's privileged geographical location gives it unique characteristics. It is located in a coastal area by the Atlantic Ocean, where there is no evidence of seismic phenomena or hurricanes, in a region with low population density and low air traffic volume. 

But the most relevant thing is that it is approximately 2º 18' South of the equator line, which means that it is in a better position than the space base of Kurú in French Guyana, more above the equator (5º 09' North) and 1,240 kilometres from Alcantara. Both generate a "centripetal" effect in the rockets caused by the rotation of the Earth, which provides an additional speed to the launcher of the order of 500 meters per second.  

Of course, the Brazilian space base is much better positioned than the American launch ramps at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They are much further north, well above the equator and more than 3,000 miles from Alcantara, so the Demo-2 Dragon Crew capsule that departed from one of them on May 30th for the International Space Station had to use 15-20% extra fuel than would have been possible from the Brazilian site.  

The United States tried a similar arrangement with previous Brazilian presidents - Fernando Cardoso, Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, Michel Temer - but it failed. Now, through a strategic partnership with Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro aims to attract the U.S. tourist and commercial launch service industry and insert his country into the limited but growing global network of spaceports gradually proliferating around the world.  

But before the expectations become a reality, the AEB must urgently implement a plan to reactivate the basic infrastructures of the space complex and its surroundings, especially staff accommodation, workshops and access roads to the base. Launches from Alcantara fell to a minimum more than 15 years ago, after the nationally manufactured VLS-1 rocket exploded on the launch pad in August 2003, killing 21 people. 

Brazil is South America's leading space power, far ahead of the rest of the continent's nations. For more than 35 years it has maintained a bilateral program with China that has allowed it to develop a family of Chinese-Brazilian observation satellites and to begin developing several ranges of fully national communications and observation platforms.  

As soon as he came to power in January 2019, Jair Bolsonaro put the first and only Brazilian astronaut, retired Lieutenant Colonel Marcos Pontes, a military engineer and an Air Force test pilot, at the head of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications. He had flown into space in a Russian Soyuz capsule and remained on board the International Space Station (ISS) for eight days in the spring of 2006. The Spanish Minister of Science and Innovation, Pedro Duque, also a former astronaut, lived on the ISS for a similar time, but about three years before Marcos Pontes.