The first vehicle off the pad was a Nike-Apache, an American two-stage sounding rocket, and it flew on 15 December 1965. That single launch made Barreira do Inferno the first space launch site in Latin America, a distinction earned eight years after Sputnik, while most of the world's rocketry was still an argument between two superpowers. The range is run by the Brazilian Air Force, under the aerospace science and technology department that oversees the country's military research establishments. It was never a cosmodrome in the Baikonur sense — no orbital pads, no gantries visible for miles — but a working scientific range, built to put instruments into the upper atmosphere and bring the data back.

A launch range needs two things above all: an empty stretch of downrange ocean and, for many missions, closeness to the equator. Barreira do Inferno sits at just under six degrees south, with nothing but the South Atlantic to the east. Spent stages fall into water. Instruments punch up through the equatorial upper atmosphere, a region with electrical behaviour that exists nowhere else on the planet and that can only be sampled from below or from directly through it. The cliffs that gave the site its name also gave it what a range wants: elevation, isolation, and a clean horizon in the direction things are supposed to go.

More than two hundred rockets have flown from here since 1965, and the list of vehicle names is a compressed history of twentieth-century upper-atmosphere research. Loki-Dart, Nike-Cajun, Nike-Apache, Nike-Tomahawk, Aerobee 150, Javelin, Super Arcas, Paiute-Tomahawk, Castor Lance. The Canadian Black Brants came in four variants, the British Skylark in one. Interleaved with the imports are the vehicles Brazil built for itself: Sonda 3, Sonda 4, the VS-30. Some flights reached above a thousand kilometres, well past the altitude at which the atmosphere stops being an atmosphere. A Black Brant went up from here in 1973, and a photograph of that launch — a bright line against the coastal dark — remains one of the range's defining images.

Brazil's orbital ambitions moved north to Alcântara, in Maranhão, which sits closer still to the equator. Barreira do Inferno adapted rather than closed. Much of its work now is tracking: following vehicles launched from Alcântara and from the Guiana Space Centre, including Ariane flights, with radar and telemetry aimed out over the same ocean. It still flies suborbital rockets, and it supports experiments for the Brazilian Navy and Army. In December 2023 a Brazilian startup launched a nationally built rocket from the site, the first time a private company had done so there. In 2024 a VS-30 carried letters written by Natal schoolchildren aloft under the name Operação Potiguar — a range sixty years old, still finding new reasons to fire.

The centre is open to visitors, by appointment, and what they find is unexpectedly modest: an air defence museum and a scatter of retired vehicles standing outdoors in salt air a short drive from the hotels of Ponta Negra. Fins weather. Paint chalks. Somebody repaints them. There is a pattern in Natal worth noticing, though nobody planned it. In the 1940s this was the place aircraft departed from to cross an ocean; from the 1960s it became the place rockets departed from to cross an atmosphere. Two very different eras chose the same corner of Brazil for the same underlying reason — because from here, the shortest way out is straight east.