PARIS: Europe yesterday set its sights on a new rocket and a deeper involvement in the International Space Station (ISS) despite intense constraints on budgets.
In a hard-fought strategy meeting in this southern Italian city, science ministers from the 20 nations of the European Space Agency (ESA) agreed to keep spending levels stable, at a total of just over ¤10bn ($12.7bn) for the next three years.
“It’s a big success in spite of the economic situation,” ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain said after the two-day meeting, the first top-level talks at the agency in four years.
The budget includes funding for a new launcher, called Ariane 5 ME, which would start to fly in 2017, and work towards a successor, Ariane 6, whose maiden flight would be in 2021 or 2022. It also finances ESA’s continuing participation in the International Space Station to 2020.
Ending weeks of uncertainty, France and Germany bridged their differences over rocket preference with a compromise that will include an assessment in 2014 of the fast-changing market for satellite launches.
“Europe has taken a new leap in space,” French Science Minister Genevieve Fioraso said as she hailed the deal.
The Naples talks had been overshadowed by discord over a replacement for the ageing but reliable Ariane 5, and many countries cast a worried eye at the emergence of US rivals, notably the fledgling corporation SpaceX, in the satellite launch market.
The goal for the new rocket is to provide more flexible launch options and reduce, the ¤120m ($152m) the Ariane 5 needs from ESA’s budget each year.
France had been pushing for a smaller, sleeker Ariane 6, able to deal with one or multiple payloads up to about six tonnes, to meet an expected trend towards smaller satellites. It would require investment of about ¤4bn ($6.45bn).
Industrialists feared the scheme was too vague and ambitious. They preferred a German-backed option, an Ariane 5 ME (for “Midlife Evolution”), able to carry two large satellites each weighing five to six tonnes, and using a new engine, the Vinci, that can reignite in order to drop off payloads in different orbits. It would be ready by 2017 at a putative cost of ¤2bn. AFP
