RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP)
- Brazil's first astronaut, Marcos
Pontes, has won the global attention that he feels his country deserved a
century ago.
docked with Russian Cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut
Jeffrey Williams at
the International Space Station on Saturday, dedicated his flight to the memory
of Brazilian inventor and aviator Alberto Santos Dumont.
Pontes planned to take with
him a Panama hat used by Santos Dumont, the Brazilian who - as all
schoolchildren here learn - was said to have invented the airplane but didn't
get credit for it.
"At the moment of takeoff,
I want to recall that 100 years ago another Brazilian took off, also outside
Brazil, in France, for another important mission,'' Pontes told local media in
an interview before his Soyuz TMA-8 took off Thursday from Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan.
Santos Dumont flew a
bamboo-and-silk biplane in Paris on Nov. 12, 1906, and was hailed across Europe
as the inventor of the airplane. Brazilians say the Wright brothers cheated by
using a takeoff ramp and were helped by a tail wind in their 1903 flight.
But today, Pontes has
become the face of Brazilian aeronautics.
The 43-year-old is featured
daily on Brazilian TV news broadcasts and in newspaper pages. The Brazilian
flag he waved in the capsule is a symbol of pride for Brazil's 185 million
people.
"Doing loops around the
Earth,'' read a headline in Rio's O Globo newspaper Saturday.
"This is the beginning of a
new era for the people of Brazil, we have opened new frontiers with this
mission,'' Pontes told Globo TV from the space station. "This is not only a
personal dream, it's a realization that can positively impact the Brazilian
youth.''
He compared the Earth's
view from space to his mother's eyes, which are blue.
"She always said I could
achieve anything that I dreamed of,'' Pontes said. "That's the message I want
to leave to everybody.''
Born into a poor family in
the southeastern city of Bauru, 700 kilometers (425 miles) west of Rio, Pontes
helped pay for his studies by working as an electrician's assistant at age 14.
A cadet at the Brazilian
Air Force Academy in Pirassununga, Pontes became a fighter pilot in 1984. He
did graduate studies in Brazil and at the Johnson Space Center and the Naval
Postgraduate School in Pasadena, California.
In 1997, Brazil joined the
15 nations involved in the International Space Station Project. A year later,
Pontes was picked for the flight by NASA and the Brazilian Space Agency.
For seven years, Pontes
trained for the mission - with some unexpected setbacks.
He was scheduled to fly to
the space station aboard a U.S. space shuttle, but NASA suspended shuttle
flights after the 2003 Columbia
[accident]. Brazil and Russia then discussed whether Pontes could fly
aboard a Russian rocket.
In 2003, Brazil's own space
program - the only one in Latin America - had an enormous setback when the
VLS-1 VO3 rocket carrying two research satellites exploded
in a ball of fire three days before its scheduled launch in Alcantara, a base
in northeastern Brazil.
Pontes knows the value of
persistence.
"When someone gives you a
mission, you go to the end,'' he said from the launch site.
He is due to return to
Earth on April 8, along with Valery
Tokarev of Russia and William McArthur of the United States.
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