Brazil, Aug 21: Brazil is poised to become the first Latin American nation to send its own rockets into space, blasting them off from a jungle launch pad first envisioned a generation ago by its former military rulers.
Situated on a lush peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil's Amazon region, nearly 800 experts and army personnel at the Alcantara launch base are working around the clock to complete the 65-foot rocket.

"As of the 25th (of August) we are ready to initiate the launch sequence," said Major-Brigadier Tiago da Silva Ribeiro, general coordinator of the project. "We have had no glitches of any kind so far."

The precise date of the launch has not been set.

Brazil's military rulers first planned to plunge the country into the space race in the 1970s, appropriating 153,200 acres for a launch complex in a tiny 17th century town, where one road was named Bitterness Street because it was central to the slave trade.

But the country has so far failed to realize that dream, almost a quarter century and hundreds of millions of dollars later. In 1997 and 1999, rockets had to be destroyed shortly after liftoff because of technical problems.

This time, at the huge base where the launch site, control, radar and weather monitoring centers are connected by neat roads running through low forest, there is a new determination to get it right.

Ribeiro, who works in military fatigues and headed the 1997 and 1999 launch attempts, says he is confident the past glitches have been resolved.

He does not plan to invite the media to the launch.

"We do not want to misdirect our attentions," Ribeiro said. Bureau Report