RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – “Our region will no longer be on the sidelines of major projects such as man’s return to the moon in 2024 and the exploitation of Mars with unmanned and manned flights”.
This statement was the declaration of intent that the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs released this week to create the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency (ALCE), an initiative that the country is promoting together with Argentina and which has attracted interest from six other nations in the region. Latin America wants its own piece of the space, and the project is expected to take its first steps in 2021.
However, it must first overcome a number of political, economic, and technical obstacles. According to the Mexican government, the plan is to launch a constellation of (small) nanosatellites focused on such topics as ocean monitoring, climate change, and agriculture. The first satellite should enter orbit by the end of next year – or by 2022 at the latest.
“Joining forces is the only possible route for countries like ours,” says José Franco, Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin. It’s a shared assessment. The space race is a struggle between David and Goliath when one compares the budgets of the major powers’ agencies with those of the region.
NASA received about US$22.6 billion this year (R$121.5 billion). For China, the figure stands at around US$11 billion (R$59 billion), according to international estimates. The European Space Agency has almost US$8 billion ( R$43 billion) to spend. The Mexican Space Agency, founded only ten years ago, has earmarked about US$3 million (about R$16 million) for 2020.
“We want to initiate the aerospace cooperation as soon as possible. We see other regions that are decades ahead of us and we can’t waste any more time,” says Efraín Guadarrama, responsible for the American regional bodies and processes of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Decline
The abyss for the great powers has not always been this large. Five years after the Soviet Sputnik inaugurated the space race in 1957, Mexico created the National Commission for Outer Space, which was relatively successful in building rockets and allowed the country to train experts and have its own infrastructure. The experiment ended abruptly in 1977. “It was decided, inexplicably, to buy the technology rather than develop it,” Franco says.
Then came feats like Rodolfo Neri Vela’s voyage, the first Mexican astronaut in 1985, and the launching of its own satellites, with the fine print in the contracts, however, showing that the only Mexican feature among them was the name. It took until 1995 for the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to send a satellite manufactured in the country into orbit.
The history of this decline (and the vision of reversing it) fits into the nationalist approach of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government foreign policy. And it has the double goal of reinforcing the country’s role as a Latin American power.
The foundation of the agreement being pursued is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a regional body that has lost relevance and political weight in recent years because of divisions among its member governments.
Mexico’s strategy, which assumed the presidency of CELAC in January, was to take politics off the agenda and lay cooperation issues on the table on which Iván Duque’s Colombia and Alberto Fernández‘s Argentina, to name but one of the complex Latin American ideological map, could agree on. The first of the 14 points was to focus on space. Not mentioning politics has been Mexico’s main political and diplomatic gamble in relation to Latin America.
Doubts
There is much optimism and also many doubts, particularly from a considerable portion of the scientific community. The most mentioned criticisms are the lack of continuity in the efforts undertaken in the past, the precarious state of budgets, and the absence of clear scientific guidelines to support the project.
The weakest point in the announcement is that what Latin America is seeking with the space program, has not yet been defined, in good measure because it is an initiative in the making. “It is not enough to present the picture. It remains to be seen if a long-term project can be built,” says Franco.
The first step is to coordinate the different countries’ efforts and see which specific projects, which are already under development, can be exploited. The group is varied. In the region, there are veterans like Argentina, who are ahead in terms of technology and knowledge. And the team relies on the membership of Paraguay, which began its space program in 2014 and hopes to launch its first nano-satellite by the end of the year.
Ecuador has a civil space program, unlike the rest of the world. Bolivia and El Salvador are also in the group, while Colombia and Peru are observer members. The great pendency is Brazil, the main regional power in space matters, which left the CELAC this year under the government of Jair Bolsonaro. “Our intention is to follow the European Space Agency’s model, which began with some countries and few projects, but then grew,” says Guadarrama.
An immense territorial extension to have access to the cosmos, a strategic location to launch equipment that follows polar or equatorial orbits, the knowledge acquired and a common language are among the advantages of Latin America, according to José Valdés, UNAM’s space program coordinator.
There are also common needs, such as telecommunications and the monitoring of natural disasters. It is not a matter of planting a flag on the moon, but rather of ending a dependence on technology in the scientific field that has had an impact on millions of daily lives, with inventions ranging from Velcro to the Internet. “We are in technological transformation,” says Valdés, “but it will be necessary to inject money and demonstrate political will”.
There is no estimate yet on the resources required, but ALCE will begin with funds countries currently earmark for their space programs. “We don’t need stratospheric investments,” says Valdés, although partnerships with other space programs, companies, and universities will be needed. Contact with China and Europe has already taken place, as well as informal talks with NASA, with the only caveat that the cooperation is for peaceful purposes, according to the Mexican Foreign Ministry.
The agency’s concrete existence will take a long time. International treaties will have to be signed, and infrastructure and technology will have to be developed, but the first projects are expected to materialize in parallel.
“Our first step will not be to reach the moon,” says Guadarrama, “but we have much to gain and little to lose. If everything goes according to plan, the first nano-satellite of the ALCE constellation, most likely developed by Mexico, will be in space approximately within the time that NASA estimates for a round trip to Mars: between a year and a half and two years.
Source: El País