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Falda del Carmen

During the late 1980s, Argentina's industrial facilities at Falda del Carmen [Skirt of Carmen] , province of Cordoba, provided a secure site for building the joint Argentine-Iraqi medium range missile. Work on the Condor-II centered at Falda del Carmen, and similar sites were later built in Egypt and Iraq. The Hydoxil Terminated Poly Butadiene fuel [the same one used in the boosters of the US Space Shuttle) was manufactured at the Falda del Carmen plant. The Instituto de Investigaciones Científicas y Téchnicas de las Fuerzas Armadas (CITEFA) operated Falda del Carmen during the Cóndor II project. The Egyptian Ministry of Defense, working with financiers from Iraq, contracted with the Argentines to produce the missile. Argentina was to provide the development of the production site, Iraq was to put up the financing, and Egypt was to procure the technology. Iraq terminated the contracts with the supplier Government in late 1988. Iraq's Argentine missile connection dated to the 1982 Falklands War, when the military junta led by Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri acquired a quantity of French-made Exocet missiles from Saddam's inventory.

The plant of Falda del Carmen was one of the sites where the military aeronautics worked over a decade in the investigation and developed of a system of missile technology to solid propellant, whose known results more were the prototypes of the missiles Condor I and Condor II. President Carlos Menem ordered at the beginning of this one decade the destruction of the missiles and the dismantling of the facilities of Falda del Carmen, obeying to the pressures exerted by the Government of the United States through his ambassador Terencio Todman and of their ex-minister of External Relations and Economy, Domingo Cavallo.

The assets of the National Commission on Space Activities were initially constituted by the following: the immovable property and installations belonging to the National Space Research Commission (CNIE), located at Avenida Dorrego 4010 of the province of Federal Capital, the industrial plant of Falda del Carmen in the province of Córdoba and the San Miguel Space Research Laboratory in the province of Buenos Aires. The installation of Cordoba Ground Station started in September 1996. Its official functioning began in March 1997, with the reception of satellite data from Landsat 5, ERS 1/2, and SPOT 1/2.

The military installations where the Argentina Air Force developed the two versions of the Condor missile, located in the Cordovan locality of Falda del Carmen, will be used by transnational companies of computer science and the telecommunications. At least five corporations of the sector of computer science and the telecommunications that will settle in the province of Cordova, and will distribute plants between the ex-military plant and the city of Villa Carlos Paz. The first corporation that confirmed its interest to take advantage of the facilities of Falda del Carmen is the manufacturer of equipment for telecommunications and distributor of signals anywhere in the world, Motorola. The facilities now will be used by a multinational of the communications, that recently failed in its attempt to take ahead the Iridium project, that it looked for to install a system of global satelite telephony.