Marcos Pontes

Marcos Pontes
Country:	Brazil
Organization:	AEB
selected on	August 27, 1998 ( 17th NASA Group )
Calls:	1 space flight
Begin:	March 30, 2006
Landing:	April 8, 2006
Time in space:	9d 21h 17min
Space flights
Soyuz TMA-8 / Soyuz TMA-7 (2006)

Marcos Cesar Pontes (born March 11, 1963 in Bauru , State of São Paulo , Brazil ) is the first and so far only Brazilian spaceman . He has been Brazil's Minister of Science since January 1, 2019.

biography

Marcos comes from Bauru, the capital of the municipality of the same name in the state of São Paulo. His father Virgílio worked at the state coffee institute IBC (Instituto Brasileiro do Café) and is now retired. His mother Zuleika was an employee of the now private railway company RFFSA (Rede Ferroviária Federal Sociedade Anônima) and died in June 2002. His older siblings Luiz Carlos and Rosa Maria still live in Bauru today.

By his own admission, Marcos spent a carefree childhood in Bauru. While his parents were at work, his sister took care of him. He learned early on to stand on his own two feet. After elementary school he had to earn the money himself to do the Abitur. During the day he worked as an apprentice at the RFFSA, trained as an electrician, and in the evening he studied at the “Colégio Técnico Liceu Noroeste”. After three years, he graduated from high school in 1980.

From February 1981 he then attended the Brazilian Air Force Academy AFA (Academia da Força Aérea) in Pirassununga (State of São Paulo). In addition to his studies, he did pilot training there. In 1984 he was able to successfully complete both: he did a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering and received his flight license.

After a one-year advanced course at the Centro de Aplicações Táticas e Recompletamento de Equipagens (CATRE) in Natal ( State of Rio Grande do Norte ), Pontes came to Fliegergruppe 3/10 in Santa Maria ( Rio Grande do Sul ) in 1986 . He was assigned to the "Centauro" fighter squadron. He perfected his flying skills there for three years until he began preparing for the entrance examination at the prestigious Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) from February 1989 . The small family - his son was born in the meantime - moved to São José dos Campos (São Paulo). He passed the difficult exam in December and then continued his studies that he had abandoned five years earlier. At the Centro Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (CTA) he studied aerospace engineering, which he completed in 1993 with a further bachelor's degree.

Always looking for new challenges, he managed to get one of the few places on the test pilot course last year at the CTA. It was the best opportunity for Pontes to combine the mainly theoretical subjects with practice. The test pilot school AEV (Divisão de Ensaios em Vôo) belongs to the aerospace institute (Instituto de Aeronáutica e Espaço) of the CTA and is the only one of its kind in the country. He not only learned how to use F-15 “Eagle” machines , F-16 "Fighting Falcon" , F / A-18 "Hornet" , F-5E "Tiger II" and MiG-29 "Fulcrum" , but he was also involved in the tests of the Brazilian short-range air-to-air missile MAA- 1 "Piranha" was involved.

In 1996 Marcos Pontes moved to the United States. The whole Pontes family - Marcos, his wife, the two children and the family dog ​​- flew with five suitcases in their luggage first to Los Angeles and then on to Monterey . Marcos was one of the approximately 800 students who come to the California coastal city of Monterey each year to attend the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). He studied systems engineering for four semesters and passed the master's examination at the NPS in the summer of 1998 . He was so good that he was suggested to do his doctorate.

Astronaut activity

In 1997, Brazil decided to participate in the International Space Station (ISS) . The intergovernmental agreement of US $ 120 million included the development and construction of some experiments and the flight of a Brazilian to the ISS.

Since Brazil does not have its own manned space program, the Brazilian space agency AEB ( Agência Espacial Brasileira ) agreed a cooperation agreement with NASA for the purpose of selection, training and flight. The AEB launched a nationwide appeal. Anyone interested in meeting NASA Mission Specialist qualifications and wanting to represent their country in space should apply. Applicants had to be between 25 and 45 years old, trained military pilots or have completed a degree in aviation. A requirement was also to be fluent in written and language English. The registration deadline was May 22, 1998. After the first screening, 40 applicants remained, five of whom - all military pilots - made it to the final round (Jose Augusto Carvalho Benoliel, Wander Almodovar Golfetto, Mozart Marques Louzada, Luiz Alberto Cocentino Munaretto and the then 35-year-old Air Force Captain Marcos Cesar Pontes). After the mandatory medical tests and an interview conducted in English, Pontes was selected in June 1998.

Together with four colleagues from ESA and a Canadian, Pontes strengthened NASA's 17th astronaut group. The entire 31 people full squad began in August 1998 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston ( Texas ), the two-year basic training.

Even during the basic training, Pontes performed important functions within the astronaut office. From 1999 he was responsible for the integration tests of new components for the ISS for the next three years. Then he took care of the station's computer programs: first he was in charge of the operating system (2000–2001), then he had to ensure that bugs were removed (2001–2002). He then supervised the development work on the centrifuge module (CAM) , the logistics modules and the solar cell carriers. Since 2003 he has been the contact person for the Japanese module Kibō and the connection node Harmony .

Pontes was originally promised to be able to fly to the ISS on board a shuttle in 2001 or 2002. But budget cuts, which forced NASA not to be able to go to the ISS as often as expected, as well as the Brazilian equipment that was not ready on time, made postponements inevitable. After all, it was the Columbia disaster in early February 2003 and the suspension of further space shuttle flights that made a start for Pontes with the Americans hopeless in the foreseeable future.

Since a working visit in spring 2005, which representatives of the Russian space agency Roskosmos paid their Brazilian colleagues, a bilateral agreement has been negotiated to bring Pontes to the space station in a Soyuz spacecraft . On September 5, 2005, Roskosmos announced that both sides had agreed that the Brazilian could probably fly to the ISS in April 2006 on board a Soyuz spaceship. Only a few details would remain open, which will be negotiated over the next few weeks. The responsible intergovernmental commission stated on October 4th that the contract was now ready to be signed and that a "preliminary agreement" had been signed. The Brazilian President Lula da Silva finally sealed the 20-million-dollar contract during his visit to Moscow on October 18 of 2005.

Since September 2005, Pontes has been training in Star City near Moscow for his week-long assignment as a flight engineer on the Soyuz TMA-8 . At the end of the training on February 8, 2006, Pontes stated that a major handicap was the language - three months were simply not enough to master a language. He can now understand Russian, but it's not enough to answer. He would answer in gibberish. But the team would have learned to understand each other.

Pontes' flight began on March 30, 2006. The importance the company had for his home country is evident from the fact that a nationally broadcast cup game in the football nation was simply interrupted to show the start live. In addition to the national flag, Pontes took with him a shirt of the Brazilian national team and a soccer ball in the national colors. After Soyuz TMA-8 reached the ISS two days later, the South American's work program included eight experiments. Pontes was also given the honor of being the first to enter the space station, followed by Pavel Vinogradov and Jeff Williams . After a week, the visit of the first Brazilian on the ISS came to an end. Together with Valery Tokarew and William S. McArthur ( ISS Expedition 12 ) he returned to Earth on April 8th.

Pontes and his Brazilian wife, whom he met in 1985, have a son and a daughter.

politics

On January 1, 2019, he was sworn in as Minister of Science ( Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações ) in the government of Jair Bolsonaro . Pontes is a member of the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB).

See also

• List of spacemen

Web links

Commons : Marcos Pontes  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Short biography of Marcos Pontes at spacefacts.de
• Biography of Marcos Pontes in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marcos Pontes aceita convite de Bolsonaro para ser ministro da Ciência. In: Correio do Povo , Porto Alegre. October 30, 2018, accessed January 14, 2019 (Brazilian Portuguese).