|
Brazilian first astronaut Marcos César Pontes is leaving this Wednesday, March 29, in The Centenary Mission, a name given in homage to another historic flight by the Brazilian Santos Dumont in aircraft 14-Bis, in 1906.
The Soyuz spacecraft in which Pontes is travelling should be launched from Baikonur base, in Kazakhstan headed for the International Space Station. This is the 13th manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) and is scheduled for liftoff at 11:30 pm tonight (Brazilian time), with Brazil's first astronaut, Marcos Pontes, aboard. Pontes has been in astronaut training for eight years preparing for this mission which is to last eight days. He will conduct a number of experiments aboard the ISS, most of them taking advantage of the lack of gravity, in order to study its effects on enzymes, proteins, DNA and various types of seeds. Besides Marcos Pontes, astronauts Jeffrey Williams (American) and Pavel Vinogradov (Russia) will be making the trip aboard a Soyuz spacecraft that will be launched from the Yuri Gagarin platform (Gagarin was the world's first astronaut, going into space in 1961) at the Russian rocket center in Baikonur. Brazilians are calling the Pontes flight "The Centenary Mission," honoring the 100 years since Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont made the world's first public flight in 1906. "The more different countries participate in missions to the International Space Station the more chance there is that it will become a permanent work station," says US astronaut, Kirk Chairman, who is a backup for the flight. Chairman declared that the Brazilian presence, although short, is important for expanding the ISS space program and its continued construction which means the addition of more modules. At the moment the ISS is the size of a football field and weighs 100 tons. Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.