European Space Agency faces reality: Its partnerships with NASA are fading
It appears that the European Space Agency (ESA) is now recognizing that two of its major partnership deals with NASA are likely going to fall apart, and it has therefore begun putting forth new proposals to repurpose those projects during a meeting in Germany this week of its member states.
The two projects are ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter intended to bring Perseverance’s Mars samples back to Earth, and its service module for NASA’s Orion capsule. In the former case, NASA’s decision to cancel the Mars Sample Return Mission leaves that orbiter in limbo. NASA might still fly a sample return mission, but it will almost certainly not do it as originally planned, involving numerous different components from many different sources in a complex Rube-Goldberg arrangement. ESA is now considering repurposing this orbiter as a research spacecraft studying the Martian atmosphere while also being a Mars communications satellite for other missions.
As for the Orion service module, ESA is now recognizing that it is unlikely NASA will continue funding Orion after it completes its presently scheduled missions, totaling at most four. ESA has contracted to build six service modules, and is now studying options for using the last few in other ways, such as a cargo tug in low Earth orbit.
ESA officials are also reviewing its entire future at the conference, considering how private enterprise has completely outrun it in all ways. Its expendable Ariane-6 rocket is a long term financial bust, being too expensive to compete in the modern launch market of reusable rockets. Its proposed IRIS2 satellite constellation will cost too much and launch far too late to compete with the private constellations already in service or being launched by SpaceX, AST-SpaceMobile, Amazon, and China.
To counter this trends, ESA has already made some major changes, shifting ownership and control of its rockets back to the private companies that build them. However, its bureaucracy has appeared resistant to this change, and is apparently lobbying for more funding and control at this week’s meeting, asking the member nations to increase their funding to the agency, giving it a total budget of 22.2 billion euros. There has also been lobbying by ESA supporters for a new Space Law that would supersede the individual space laws of its member states, and also attempt to impose its regulations on non-member nations, beyond its sovereign authority. That law is strongly opposed by the U.S., the private sector, and even some of ESA’s member nations.
The bottom line however is that the nature of the European Space Agency is undergoing major changes, with its work increasingly shifting to its member nations instead of being part of a cooperative effort. While ESA bureaucrats continue to push to protect and strengthen their turf, ESA’s member nations have been increasingly pushing back, and winning that battle.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
It appears that the European Space Agency (ESA) is now recognizing that two of its major partnership deals with NASA are likely going to fall apart, and it has therefore begun putting forth new proposals to repurpose those projects during a meeting in Germany this week of its member states.
The two projects are ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter intended to bring Perseverance’s Mars samples back to Earth, and its service module for NASA’s Orion capsule. In the former case, NASA’s decision to cancel the Mars Sample Return Mission leaves that orbiter in limbo. NASA might still fly a sample return mission, but it will almost certainly not do it as originally planned, involving numerous different components from many different sources in a complex Rube-Goldberg arrangement. ESA is now considering repurposing this orbiter as a research spacecraft studying the Martian atmosphere while also being a Mars communications satellite for other missions.
As for the Orion service module, ESA is now recognizing that it is unlikely NASA will continue funding Orion after it completes its presently scheduled missions, totaling at most four. ESA has contracted to build six service modules, and is now studying options for using the last few in other ways, such as a cargo tug in low Earth orbit.
ESA officials are also reviewing its entire future at the conference, considering how private enterprise has completely outrun it in all ways. Its expendable Ariane-6 rocket is a long term financial bust, being too expensive to compete in the modern launch market of reusable rockets. Its proposed IRIS2 satellite constellation will cost too much and launch far too late to compete with the private constellations already in service or being launched by SpaceX, AST-SpaceMobile, Amazon, and China.
To counter this trends, ESA has already made some major changes, shifting ownership and control of its rockets back to the private companies that build them. However, its bureaucracy has appeared resistant to this change, and is apparently lobbying for more funding and control at this week’s meeting, asking the member nations to increase their funding to the agency, giving it a total budget of 22.2 billion euros. There has also been lobbying by ESA supporters for a new Space Law that would supersede the individual space laws of its member states, and also attempt to impose its regulations on non-member nations, beyond its sovereign authority. That law is strongly opposed by the U.S., the private sector, and even some of ESA’s member nations.
The bottom line however is that the nature of the European Space Agency is undergoing major changes, with its work increasingly shifting to its member nations instead of being part of a cooperative effort. While ESA bureaucrats continue to push to protect and strengthen their turf, ESA’s member nations have been increasingly pushing back, and winning that battle.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The ESA is even less cognizant than NASA that the era of government space agencies and their “programs” is rapidly coming to a near-total close. The main difference between here and there is that the US has a vibrant private-sector space ecosystem that Europe almost entirely lacks. So there is enormously less of a “forcing function” at work in Europe vs. the US to move more and more space activity into private hands pursuing private ends. Europe, I fear, will continue to be an overly statist backwater where space is concerned for the foreseeable future.
Dick: I think you are being too pessimistic. In the past three years I have seen a real effort in Germany, Spain, Italy, and now even France, to push their private sector instead of ESA and its “space program.” These countries are certainly behind because of years of centralized top-down control, but there is strong evidence they are finally beginning to climb out of that abyss.
This ESA meeting this week is actually I think a fulcrum point. If those nations can push back successfully against the ESA bureaucracy, things will improve considerably and quickly in Europe. If not, then I think your analysis will be more on the mark.
I think that push back will succeed, but then, I am always a wide-eyed optimist.
One of the commenters on Batchelor, Simon Constable, characterizes Europeans as markedly less risk tolerant than Americans. He discusses this in the context of AI, but I’m sure it’s similar in rocketry.
They just don’t have tech in their blood.
Musk and China, even the broke Soviets post WWII were futurists…cosmists.
If it isn’t about wine snobbery or other culture-first touchstones…they don’t care.
Yes, there are a few pushing for independent access..but not enough.
This is why I suggested Elon build a SH pad in Kourou, so the Euros can build an A6 size upper stage.
Don’t break their rice bowl (I hate that term) just give junior a booster chair :)
This would keep them employed…and give the United States (by which I mean SpaceX) some bargaining leverage.
If the Euros persists in trying to lord it over other space powers, Elon withholds SuperHeavy and back they go into the junior leagues. It won’t matter WHO is in the White House.
Then the Vega guys can concentrate on aiming solids at Ivan.
Now Elon will need to fund this–but I think this a better investment than Argentina.
The Europeans won’t spend much more than they spend now–but get a much more hefty payload in return for keeping their collective mouths zipped.
” I have seen a real effort in Germany, Spain, Italy, and now even France …”
The question is whether the effort is just to replace the ESA bureaucracy with their own national bureaucracies. I’m sure there are bureaucrats in all these countries salivating at the prospect of an entire new arena to regulate. Will they be suppressed?
Call Me Ishmael: From what I have reported here at BtB repeatedly, those countries are not establishing new “space programs” or “space agencies”, they are establishing laws to encourage the growth of an independent private sector. Germany has 3 rocket startups, Spain one, Italy the already established Avio, and France has I think three. All are private not government.
Just a reminder guys… Although a few in the European parliament may wish otherwise, the EU is first and foremost a trading coalition . There is no one from one countries government that can tell another’s what to do.
@Bob.. quote “I am always a wide-eyed optimist.”
This made me literally laugh out loud!
Lee S: I should have added that I am also a hard-nosed realist at the same time. One can’t do great things with looking that things as they are, so you know exactly what you need to do to make them better.
Gary,
Mr. Constable has it exactly right. For the last five centuries, nearly all of the risk-tolerant Europeans have emigrated to the Americas, a process that only sped up once the European colonial empires were sent packing. Where risk is concerned, I think these migrations have rendered the genetics of Americans fundamentally different than those of the descendants of the stay-put Europeans.
Robert Zimmerman,
I, too, hope Europe can get its act together. Based on my experiences working in Europe for a couple of years nearly a half-century ago, even the young people of that time there were notably less ambitious than normative Yanks. And Europe has aged far faster than the US in the meantime while its fertility rates have nose-dived. There simply aren’t a lot of young people there anymore even of the cautious type. And the older one gets, the less likely one is to kick over the traces and try something entirely new.
The new European rocket companies are all working on fairly small rockets. As Sir Peter Beck recently pointed out, it’s actually harder to make a reusable small rocket than a medium- or large-size one. That being the case, it’s questionable how many, if any, of these EuroNewSpace start-ups will survive long enough to develop a 2nd-generation – larger – product. And even if one or more of them do, it will be the mid-2030s at the earliest before any such beast could be flying – probably later. By that time, SpaceX will effectively own most of the Solar System.
Lee S,
It isn’t so much European countries telling one another what to do as it is the EU overlay government telling all of its constituent member states what to do – like continue to let in unlimited numbers of hostile tribal barbarian psychopaths. Your current nation-of-residence, Sweden, has been very badly served by this policy and is hardly alone in that respect.
Sweden–bless them–was too good hearted..
These days, tolerance is another spelling for suicide
Honestly, this could be a step forward toward more effective space policy: every EU country has its own interminable bureaucracy, but there will still be fewer chefs in the kitchen than in Brussels or Strasbourg.
@Bob…. My comment was very much tongue in cheek… As you know. I have followed your informed commentary for what must be almost a couple of decades now. From zero commercial space to what we have today, and you have always been positive ( and proved correct) about the promise of commercial space..
@pretty much everyone else..
Im guessing some of the comments here are regarded the immigration situation in Sweden.. I can’t argue that mistakes have been made, but having grown up in the UK in the 70’s I know the unrest will pass. I’ve witnessed with my own eyes.. the first generation of immigrants are happy to be out of whatever situation made them leave home, the second generation are the problem generation.. disenfranchised and stuck between 2 worlds.. by the 3rd generation the kids are native to whatever land they live in and just want to work, marry, and raise their kids, just like we all do. The unrest will pass.
Regarding any EU regulations regarding space endeavours… I’m pretty sure that should any member country see a profit in space, the EU has absolutely zero authority to hold them back. It’s a trading coalition ( with occasional delusions of grandeur) … Nothing more.
Lee S,
It would be nice if the assimilation progression you describe was actually taking place in Europe. But as long as essentially unrestricted and unfiltered immigration persists, it will not. New arrivals will continue to refresh the instruction of the young in the ways of the old countries and short-circuit any assimilation. The continually growing numbers of immigrants, in turn, will only exacerbate us-vs-them-ism on the parts of both the native and non-native populations, further damaging any residual assimilation. This is what has happened – and continues to happen – in both your native UK and your current nation-of-residence, Sweden.
This occurred even in the US which, at least, had a cultural tradition of accepting immigrants and lacked a blood-and-soil national identity of the European type. No nation in Europe has such cultural advantages anent immigrant assimilation.
The result, in the US, was the immigration near-cut-off of the 1920s through 1960s. That allowed assimilation of previous mass immigration waves of the prior 100 years to take place along the lines you outlined.
The vastly increased immigration to the US since the ’60s – particularly the illegal variety – has resulted in new ghettoizations and separatisms. These are made still worse by the regnant woke-ification of American elementary, secondary and university education which is actively anti-assimilation instead of, as formerly, its principal engine.
The cure will be to both seriously restrict all immigration to the US for some time – especially from Muslim nations – and to wrest control of the education establishment from its current woke grandees. Neither will prove easy, especially the latter. The US Democratic Party is sponsoring the current invasion and, as recent events have shown, will resort to violence to maintain it.
In Europe, the problem will be even tougher to deal with given the total lack of any cultural tradition of assimilation in any European nation. Europe’s generally terminal native-population demographics simply make matters worse as the whole concept of assimilation will be rendered nugatory when there are no longer any native European populations in most places into which to assimilate.
A century hence, the Middle East, except for Israel, will likely have long since died back to the minimal level of population that can be supported in a pre-modern lifestyle on genuinely wretched land. Those Muslims who escaped to Europe during the 20th- and 21st-century good times – once having seen off or enslaved the last of the vanishing Europeans – except maybe the French – will likely have formed a number of ceaselessly warring “caliphates,” each claiming to be the true heirs of Mohammed.
Unless the vanishing nations of Europe make, as the funeral industry likes to say, “arrangements in advance of need” with the US to look after their cultural heritage sites, the howling barbarians will have their way with them as they have everywhere else. St. Peters will become a mosque. The Pieta and the David will be crushed for gravel. The Sistine Ceiling will be sanded down and repainted with Sherwin-Williams or equivalent. Or perhaps covered in geometric tilework.
The US may well be inclined to let nature take its course, intervening only to disinter and repatriate all of its WW1 and WW2 military dead currently buried in European ground and then leave the whole place to its unhappy fate.