Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales
| Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales | |
 |
|
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed |
January 28, 1960 (As CNIE) May 28, 1991 (As CONAE) |
| Preceding agency |
|
| Jurisdiction | Argentine government |
| Headquarters | Buenos Aires, A.C. |
| Employees | 1,000+ |
| Annual budget |
 1.863 million ARS ($180 million) (2016) |
| Agency executive |
|
| Website | www.conae.gob.ar |
January 28, 1960 (As CNIE)
Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE; in English, National Space Activities Commission) is the civilian agency of the government of Argentina in charge of the national space program.
During the 1940s Teofilo Tabanera organized a group of foreign and Argentine specialists as the Sociedad Argentina Interplanetaria, SAI (Argentine Interplanetary Society). Tabanera's efforts ensured that Argentina was the first Latin American nation to create a spaceflight organization and in 1952 was one of the founding members of the International Astronautical Federation. Argentinean Aldo Cocca was a pioneer in space law and helped originate the idea of space being the common heritage of humankind, later enshrined in United Nations treaties of the 1960s.
In 1960 Tabanera was named head of the newly created Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones Espaciales CNIE (National Commission for Space Research), a forerunner agency founded in 1960.
CNIE worked with the Argentine Air Force's Instituto de Investigaciones Aeronáuticas y Espaciales (IIAE) to develop a number of indigenous multistage high-altitude sounding rockets and missiles. Argentina was the first country in Latin America to send an object into space using an indigenously-developed rocket.
During the 1970s Argentina regularly launched the American two-stage solid-propellant Castor rocket up to 500 kilometers altitude. This rocket carried international experiments for several countries.
In the 1980s Argentina took part in a multinational effort to develop the Condor missile. Under U.S. pressure, the Condor Program was canceled in 1991. The associated development and production facilities at Falda del Carmen were closed down, the Fabrica Militar de Aviones, which concentrated on development of surveillance satellites for earth resource and environmental monitoring.
The present commission (CONAE) was created on May 28, 1991 during the government of Carlos Menem, after the cancellation of the military Condor missile program in an attempt to move all the commission efforts to civilian purposes. It received the Air Force aerospace facilities in Córdoba and Buenos Aires of the former CNIE, as well as some of the civil personnel involved in the canceled project.
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