ERIK D’AMATO  |  photos by AFP/GETTY IMAGES

On a Sunday afternoon in late March 2023, a rocket lifted off from the Alcântara Launch Center on Brazil’s north coast carrying a payload for the Brazilian Air Force. The launch was the 500th at the spaceport, which is even closer to the equator (2.3 degrees) than the more well-known European-run center in neighboring French Guiana. The launch involved several firsts, including the use of a hybrid motor employing solid fuel fed with liquid oxidizer via an electric pump. 

While on some levels a smashing success, the Alcântara launch also highlighted Brazil’s uneasy position as a relative space fledgling despite its work developing rockets for more than a half century. In many ways, Brazil is a global player in aerospace. Formerly state-owned Embraer, for example, trails only Boeing and Airbus in civil aircraft production. But the Brazilian Air Force payload launched in March 2023 was a 20-kilogram SISNAV inertial navigation system undergoing only a brief suborbital test. The launch vehicle was developed by a startup from South Korea, where two months later the national space agency celebrated its first commercial orbital launch, something Brazil has yet to achieve. 

The notion of Brazil as the perpetual “country of the future” is a well-worn cliche. In the case of space development, at one point even the future stopped looking promising. An accident at Alcântara in 2003 caused the death of more than 20 engineers and technicians and led to the cancellation of the VLS-1 launch vehicle program the country had pinned its hopes on. For years after, civil and military space budgets were stagnant or cut. As governments in Korea, India and other peer countries ramped up their space spending by as much as billions of dollars over the previous decade, by 2020 the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB) was left with less than the equivalent of $50 million — about the same as the space budget of tiny Luxembourg — and less than half of which may have been spent.  

At the same time, the picture is not just one of post-disaster recovery and austerity. Many in the space sector now speak of a new renaissance for the country’s civil and military space efforts and of deeper links to the Western space ecosystem. In 2021, the first Brazilian-developed Earth observation satellite — Amazônia-1 — was put into service, followed in 2022 by a pair of civilian/military satellites (Carcará I and II, named for the bird of prey found throughout South America). A crucial Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) was inked with the United States in 2019, allowing for U.S. launches from Alcântara, and two years later Brazil became the first country in South America to sign the Artemis Accords, the U.S.-led multilateral arrangement aimed at bolstering human space travel. Less than a year after the creation of the U.S. Space Force, Brazil inaugurated its dedicated military Space Operations Center. 

But the picture of space development in Latin America’s largest country is complex.

The proximity to the equator of the Alcântara Launch Center in northeast Brazil reduces the thrust needed by launch vehicles to place payloads into orbit.

Dual use

The first such complexity involves a broad overlap between civil and military aerospace functions.

According to Paulo Eduardo Vasconcellos, a retired Air Force general who served as director of strategic intelligence and new business at the AEB, this starts with the fact that in Brazil, the Air Force rather than a civilian agency like the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has responsibility for all air space.

“We have a unique setup because the Air Force controls it all, from the trees to space,” said Vasconcellos, who now works in the country’s growing private space sector.

The Carcará radar imaging satellites launched in 2022 and controlled by the Air Force’s new Space Operations Center are in part designed to look at trees, with monitoring of deforestation and migration among the tasks that in other countries might be handled by civilian bodies. The geostationary communications satellite put into service in 2017 and known as SGDC-1 (Geostationary Defense and Strategic Communications Satellite) jointly serves military and civilian users, including thousands of rural public schools, via the only competition to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service across Brazil. Likewise, the Alcântara Launch Center is under military command, while welcoming civil and commercial space launches.

The patchwork of civil-military space operations is matched by a broad diversity of partners and suppliers. A solid-fuel orbital launch vehicle — VLM — that followed the failed VLS-1 program is being developed in partnership with the German Aerospace Center. The SGDC-1 geostationary communication satellite was built by French-Italian Thales Alenia Space and launched by Arianespace at the Guiana Space Center. The Carcará I and II civilian/military satellites were designed by Finnish satellite tech firm ICEYE and launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Amazônia-1 has a primary computer provided by INVAP of Argentina and was launched by an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the southeastern Indian province of Andhra Pradesh. And Amazônia-1 is being operated jointly with satellites launched earlier as part of the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) program, which Brazil entered in the early 1980s.

An Ariane 5 rocket lifts off from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, during May 2017. The spaceport is about 1,200 kilometers northwest of Brazil’s Alcântara Launch Center, both along the Atlantic Coast.

Cooperation with China

Brazil’s longstanding cooperation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in satellite technology has unsurprisingly led to longstanding concerns in the United States. In the first Strategic Framework for Space Diplomacy, released by the U.S. in May 2023, the first challenge listed is the PRC’s attempt to match or surpass the U.S. in space and “erode U.S. influence across military, technological, economic, and diplomatic spheres.” Likewise, U.S. policymakers are troubled by a growing Chinese diplomatic-military presence on the ground in Latin America, including by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which has participated in Brazil’s elite jungle warfare school.

Brazilian experts downplay the military implications of the cooperation, comparing it with the ongoing military-to-military space ties with the U.S., which, starting in 2020, have included U.S.-Brazil Space Engagement Talks hosted by U.S. Southern Command.

“I believe that the major collaboration between Brazil and China will continue to be formally maintained at the civilian level,” said Dr. Ana Soliz de Stange, a researcher at the Helmut Schmidt University, the German defense university, and an expert on the “triangular” relationship between the U.S., Latin America and the PRC. “But we have to consider the following: First, Brazil’s system of space activities has been increasingly structured institutionally toward the potential dual use of satellite technology. And second, the Brazilian space program is strongly linked to bilateral collaboration with China. In addition, there are cooperation agreements in force between Brazil and China in the defense sector, and specifically in the satellite sector.”

The China-Brazil space relationship was most recently solidified in April 2023, when Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping in Beijing and signed a deal for the sixth satellite in the CBERS program. Lula also visited the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., which is sanctioned by the U.S. Russia also said recently that Brazil is one of  a small number of countries interested in participating in the Russian Orbital Station envisioned as a successor to the International Space Station. 

Aiming for autonomy

Despite these complexities, many in the small Brazilian military space fraternity seem confident that the U.S. will accept Brazil’s desire to build strategic autonomy when it comes to both civilian and military space operations.

“Being a friend of China doesn’t mean we are an enemy of the U.S.,” said José Vagner Vital, a retired major general who served as executive vice president of the Brazilian Air Force’s Space Commission and is now a vice president of the International Academy of Space Studies, a nonprofit based in San Catarina, Brazil. 

According to Vital, it is crucial for policymakers in the U.S. and elsewhere to understand that Brazil’s desire to have autonomy in space does not depend on which government is in power but instead is “the Brazilian point of view.” Vital cited the VLM launch vehicle program as an example. “VLM is good for autonomy. You must have the capacity to do it yourself.” 

Krista Langeland, deputy lead of the Rand Space Enterprise Initiative, agreed that it would be naive for the U.S. to believe that Brazil would abandon its drive for strategic autonomy, or even to limit its cooperation with China, especially given the booming trade between the countries. 

“The U.S. often thinks, ‘Whose side is Brazil going to be on?’ But it’s not about which side they are going to choose,” Langeland said. “When we set our objectives, it’s to our detriment to think in an us versus them perspective.”

All aboard

While the “Brazilian point of view” on autonomy and broad partnerships in space appears unshakable, it is not without its risks. 

Charles Galbreath, a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies who previously served on the technology and innovation staff of the U.S. Space Force, said Brazil’s approach demands it pay special attention to sharing agreements and other limitations, to prevent “dead ends” in development, and other costly and time-consuming mistakes. “It’s important [for them] to think through the whole thing up front, and make informed decisions,” he said.

Meanwhile, budget constraints and other limitations continue to weigh heavily on what could be one of the world’s most advanced civil-military space industries.

Vasconcellos noted that compared with the phenomenal success of Embraer, which began life under the wing of the Air Force, the country’s private space ecosystem hasn’t successfully evolved. In part, he said, this is because of a misplaced desire to maintain control of system integration, leaving even the most promising companies bidding to supply smaller components. “The approach they have used doesn’t allow companies to flourish. That’s the challenge we have here,” he said.

But Vasconcellos said the ingredients are otherwise there for an industry that can serve both civil and military clients domestically and worldwide, and Vital argued that the country’s policy of strategic autonomy in space will eventually serve business as well. “If you have autonomy, you have a good place in the market,” he said. He also sees promise in reports that Brazilian scientists in space-related fields are declining offers to move abroad. 

Brazil’s dual-use tradition may augur well for its desire to maintain a broad array of space partners worldwide. “As more and more countries integrate space applications and operations into their national security strategies, more and more opportunities for a nation to engage its allies into those approaches and plans are also created,” said Shelli Brunswick, then chief operating officer of U.S. nonprofit the Space Foundation. “Brazil’s space activities are in many ways already aligned with U.S. and European partners. This creates an environment of collaboration, and an organic outcome could well be closer for U.S.-Brazil coordination in space, whether for national security purposes or otherwise.”  


Amid drive for autonomy, Brazil makes space for U.S. ties

Brazil’s longstanding desire for strategic autonomy in space has not prevented it from forging an increasing number of agreements and ties with the United States. In addition to the Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) ratified in 2019 after almost two decades of effort, and the Artemis Accords signed in 2021, other bilateral agreements and initiatives involving military space activities have been made in recent years.

In August 2018, Brazil and the U.S. Department of Defense signed a Space Situational Awareness Agreement, followed in March 2019 by a Research Design Testing and Evaluation Agreement, and in April 2019, Brazil was designated a Major NATO Non-Ally. Brazil was also the first nation to conduct high-level “space engagement talks” with the U.S. Space Force after the Space Force’s creation in December 2019.

Some of the agreements and initiatives took place during the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro, but experts say recent shifts from populist left to populist right and back has played little role in the space agreements.

Reeve Wolford, a Rio de Janeiro-based executive and consultant with space tech firm Orion AST, contrasts the ruling Workers’ Party’s strong opposition to the TSA in the early 2000s to the priority given a decade later to passage of two important defense agreements with the U.S.: The Defense Cooperation Agreement and the General Security of Military Information Agreement. Brazil and the U.S. also began
a top-level Defense Cooperation Dialogue aimed at expanding the scope of their military partnerships.

Meanwhile, in 2015, the presidents of the two countries endorsed the creation of the U.S.-Brazil Defense Industry Dialogue (DID), a mechanism to promote the strategic integration of defense industries in Brazil and the U.S. The DID, managed on the U.S. side by the Department of Commerce, is focused on creation of a reciprocal defense procurement agreement giving national status to each country’s defense companies, including contractors in the area of military space.

Share.
Leave A Reply