Officials are setting the course for Europe’s future in space at a high-level meeting in Berlin, Germany, on Monday and Tuesday. Key issues up for debate include whether Europe should cooperate with Russia on a new spaceship to replace the Soyuz and whether it should use only European launchers for its missions.
Ministers from the 18 member nations of the European Space Agency, including Canada, are discussing which programmes to fund over the next five years. ESA’s budget from 2006 to 2010 contains 8.8 billion ($10.4 billion).
That is significantly smaller than NASA’s budget, which is more than $16 billion per year. And unlike the US, ESA must campaign for many of its programmes by asking individual member nations to support them – which can be contentious.
“It’s difficult,” says ESA press officer Brigitte Kolmsee. “If you have a company with different shareholders, you have the same problem with getting the programme on track.”
The programmes to be voted on include whether to fund a two-year study costing about 50 million ($59 million) into the preliminary designs for a Russian spaceship called Kliper. This would replace the Soyuz spacecraft, which is currently used to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, and would guarantee Europe independent access to space.
Officials will also vote on a resolution to use only European launchers for its space missions rather than rockets from Russia or other countries, which might be cheaper. ESA is considering spending 1.1 billion ($1.3 billion) on programmes to develop the French-built Ariane rockets and a new Italian rocket called Vega, as well as its launch facility in Kourou, French Guiana.
And ESA ministers will decide whether to rebuild the ice-observation satellite CryoSat, which crashed in October 2005 after a problem with its Rockot launcher. The replacement mission is part of a 1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) proposal for an Earth-observing programme.
Other projects being considered include a lander called ExoMars to search for signs of life on the Red Planet and a new system to combine all data from Earth-observing missions, called Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES).