Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE)

COMISION NACIONAL DE ACTIVIDADES ESPACIALES (CONAE) is the civilian agency of the government of Argentina in charge of the national space program. Argentina’s first activities in the space field go back to 1961, when the National Commission for Space Research (Comision Nacional de Investigaciones Espaciales, CNIE) was first established. A civil engineer, Mr. Teofilo Tabanera was its first president. CONAE’s Space Center in the province of Cordoba has been named in his honor.

CNIE, working with local and international partners, carried out the first southern hemisphere scientific atmospheric physics using rockets and stratospheric balloons.

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 Cordoba and Buenos Aires of the former CNIE, as well as some of the civil personnel involved in the canceled project.

Since the 1990s, the new commission has signed agreements with NASA and European agencies and has developed a number of Earth Observation satellites, including SAC-A, the failed mission SAC-B, and the SAC-C launched in 2000 and still operating.