A Regional Space Agency For Latin America PDF Download

The cooperation on space exploration is an essential element to achieve significant progress in developing countries especially given the needs and costs of exploration. In the Latin American region, the vast majority of countries have little experience in space but they have many interests in common. So far, the cooperation among these countries has been nonexistent or very recent. Nevertheless, the region has common needs and common problematic, cooperation has been essentially cooperation between countries in the region with developed countries or space faring nations. Although this cooperation has allowed the development of national activities in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, the need to respond to the aspirations of nations it's essential a regional cooperation. Several major attempts have been done to establish regional cooperation. This process began in 1991 with the Space Conference of the Americas. In the 6 meetings held so far, much progress has been made and many space agencies were created. However, no projects have been created and the future of this mechanism is uncertain. Another attempt resulted in a spatial cooperation UNASUR meeting in which it was determined the creation of a regional agency, but neither has seen concrete results. Recently under the impetus of the International academy of astronautics (IAA), international experts, academia and the head of the regional agencies had declared the importance of establishing a regional cooperation mechanism. From this meeting turned the idea of creating an Alliance of space agencies, as a mechanism for creating common projects and as a forum for possible projects and contributions of the region. However, these initiatives have not achieved the objectives nor had real developments. Finally, the last proposal is the creation of a network of universities interested in the development of space activities in Latin America to achieve cooperation from research, as in Europe. This paper aims to show the evolution of the regional cooperation in Latin America and seeks to expose the recent initiative on the network of universities in Latin America as an initial solution to the lack of cooperation in the region.