Europe's choice on human spaceflight

Europeans: Once Explorers, Always Explorers was the title of a talk given in 2019 by Dr. David Parker, head of ESA’s Human and Robotic Exploration directorate, and the motto has frequently been reused in other contexts by other senior ESA officials and employees. Through its solar system exploration programmes, ESA has indeed been a fantastic enabler of Europeans’ space ambitions, particularly so in the last thirty years. Indeed, while ESA was established in 1975, it was not until the 90’s that Europe gained the expertise and industrial maturity to conduct major solar system exploration missions independently, from conception, construction and testing to launch and operations. This resulted in triumphs such as Mars Express, launched in 2003, the mission which may well have discovered the first convincing evidence of large-scale presence of water in the under the surface of Mars, and was the first to detect the presence of methane in its atmosphere, a gas of great astrobiological interest whose origin intrigues the scientific community to this day [1,2,3]. A decade later, Rosetta/Philae became the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and to place a lander on it, and produced a scientific legacy we are only beginning to understand: the discovery of organics, the question of whether or not Earth’s water came from comets, unprecedented measurements of the properties of the surface and interior of comets, the list goes on [4,5,6,7]. Through its participation to the international Cassini-Huygens mission, ESA also has a lander on Saturn’s moon Titan, and remains to this day to most distant man-made object to land on an extraterrestrial body. The near future holds exciting prospects as well, with ESA leading the euro-japanese BepiColombo mission en route to Mercury, the russo-european Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, and is in the final stages of preparations to launch the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer; all highly complex spacecrafts that cement Europe’s position as a scientific and technological leader in solar system exploration.

The situation with manned space exploration, on the other hand, is decidedly a lot more awkward. Indeed, Europe never possessed a vehicle of its own to send astronauts into orbit, a so-called independent access to space. This gap has perpetually handicapped ESA’s human spaceflight ambitions and has prevented it from being in a position to lead any initiative. Effectively, it has forced Europe into negotiating with other space powers – the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States of America – for access to space in exchange for what are essentially gifts in kind. The way ESA made contributions to the ISS, a station built almost in its entirety by the two aforementioned countries, was primarily by building modules and transferring their complete ownership to NASA in exchange for the promise of having European astronauts onboard “their” station. Even the Colombus module, technically Europe’s own laboratory on the ISS, does not entirely belong to Europe, as ESA is only “granted” 51% of the experiment time on it. While international collaboration is important, it is evident that Europe never has a strong hand in these negotiations, and the reasons behind this weakness are equally clear. The situation isn’t set to change for the foreseeable future: ESA’s principal next objective is securing the presence of European astronauts on future NASA Artemis missions, while offering technical contributions which are once again far too small to influence the agenda.

Relics of a bygone era. The Hermès proposal for a European manned compact shuttle. [Credits: ESA/CNES]

Things weren't always this way. In the late 70’s started a series of studies for a reusable vehicle that would secure an autonomous access to space for Europe. Hermès, a project for compact shuttle which would carry a crew of three into low Earth orbit, propelled by an enormous liquid-fuel rocket with two solid propellant boosters. This vehicle would allow European astronauts to board either American or Soviet space stations, as Europe also drew plans for its own station. Hermès was supposed to be the gateway to Europe’s golden age of human spaceflight, the enabler of Europe as an equal player to the Soviet Union and the United States.

In 1992 the programme was cancelled due to financing issues. While all was not lost – Hermès’ launcher went on to become the highly-successful Ariane V – Europe’s ambitions for human spaceflight effectively died that year, and ESA has been stuck with its dependency to the US and the ISS ever since. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. With ESA spending about 10% of its 7 billion euro budget on human spaceflight, a significant amount for Europe, but one too low to run any independent programme of interest, it is worth asking if ESA shouldn’t drop human spaceflight altogether, and reallocate the funds to more interesting activities.

Is manned spaceflight even useful? It is certainly a very legitimate question to ask, as illustrated by the rather stark divide within the space community itself. The arguments for and against it abound. Proponents usually defend its intrinsic inspirational value on humanity as well the industrial and technological fallout it generates for the aerospace industry and beyond. Opponents point out that the science enabled by human spaceflight is extremely limited, if not downright insignificant, or at least that it is so cost-ineffective that the benefit for space science as a whole is negative, and that technological advances brought forth by research on human spaceflight rarely end up being useful elsewhere. One thing both camps agree on, however, is that manned spaceflight is an astonishing technical and human prowess, a sort of testimony to mankind’s capabilities. If scientifically uninteresting, the feat of sending humans far outside of Earth’s atmosphere “for the beauty of the gesture” is one so inspirational it is of almost artistic value.

Before becoming Europe's commercial and institutional workhorse, Ariane V was originally designed to send Hermès and its crew to low Earth orbit space stations. [Credits: ESA/CNES]

Then, if the goal of human spaceflight is to inspire one's citizens through the mastery of the technical feat, it can be said without much controversy that Europeans do not have much to look up to. Europe indeed lacks any Vostok, Mir, or Apollo moment, and ESA has to advertise their barter agreements with NASA, i.e., the presence of ESA astronauts on the ISS, as its main accomplishment. However, that a European boards a capsule Europe didn’t develop, atop a rocket Europe didn't built, and flies towards a station Europe only marginally contributed to, isn’t exceedingly interesting from a European point of view. This is especially the case if the outreach activities our astronauts are doing on the ISS – which, let us be honest, is the only interesting aspect of human spaceflight – focus on artificially stoking the national pride of the ESA member state they hail from, and do not even foster a European identity.

If this is what we are getting, then, perhaps it is preferable to leave human spaceflight to the nations that actually commit to it, and to refocus our efforts on more scientifically-interesting endeavours. If we are to continue doing human spaceflight, on the other hand, let us actually do human spaceflight instead of keeping up this costly façade of a programme. Europe is demonstrably capable of so much better. Given how successful and transformational ESA’s solar system exploration, astrophysics, and Earth observation missions have been, either option would be preferable to the clumsy middle ground on which ESA currently stands.

The debate on XXIst century issues in Europe and the US

“What happens in America happens in Europe ten years later”, or so the saying goes. While some will argue that this number is closer to fifteen or twenty, the popular wisdom that Europe is a passive, almost helpless adopter of everything American often goes unchallenged. According to that worldview, Europe would be perpetually lagging behind its younger transatlantic cousin, overtaken in culture, policy, or science, unable to produce ideas with worldwide reach, too fragmented and multilingual to matter. The intellectual centre of gravity of the West, we are told, resides in the country whose universities populate the top 30 positions of the Academic Ranking of World Universities, a table published each year by a private consultancy firm based in Shanghai. The market capitalisation of US software companies, or the box office generated by tirelessly-exploited superhero comic franchises, would be all the more evidence that the domination of US culture is undeniable.

And yet, one cannot help but to notice the absence of a significant and intellectually fertile debate coming from that part of the world on the era-defining issues of the twenty-first century, especially after the death of Murray Bookchin. The meta-crisis of climate change and the destruction of ecosystems represents an unprecedented challenge, for it is the first time humanity has had to face a problem (albeit entirely self-inflicted) that threatens the very existence of its civilisations. It is not an issue that will be fixed simply by buying more electric cars and by installing more solar panels. Entirely new economic models in the face of ever-declining resources and an ever-warming climate, the question of the need for growth, truly sustainable transportation and agricultural practices, climate-resiliency of cities; these are some of the issues that need revolutionary thinking.

With the recent presidential elections in the United States, it is a striking observation to make that a lot Europeans seem to pay at least as much attention to the US presidential campaigns as those of their own national and European politicians, and given the importance they seem to give to that particular North-American country, it is worthwhile to ask what can be expected from it on the issues that will really matter in this century. The unfortunate answer being, I argue, not much. This is by no means an attempt at diminishing the efforts of the US academics, politicians, and activists who push policy and discourse on environmental issues in the right direction (Senators Bernard Sanders and Elisabeth Warren come to mind). Their efforts are to be lauded and supported, and ideas should never be judged on where they originate from. However, it does seem to be that case that, in the Western hemisphere, it is mostly in Europe that a fruitful discussion on the aforementioned societal problems is taking place.

Despite talks about how technology could make it possible to grow our economies at an exponential rate indefinitely, at no point in recent history has a decoupling between world GDP and CO2 emissions been observed. In other words, the so-called “green growth” is a myth. How then, could humans prosper in the next hundred years? The paradox of a world economy relying on an eternal exponential growth on a planet with finite resources was a focal point of the work of the “Club of Rome”, an international group of academics, industrialists and heads of state founded in 1968 at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Their first report, “The Limits of Growth”, analysed current trends in the use of resources, and predicted a brutal drop of GDP and world population at some point in the twenty-first century. This collapse, they argue, could however be averted by a gradual, controlled decrease of human economic activity towards sustainable levels. More recently, these theses have been picked up by French engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici, whose organisation The Shift Project aims at practically defining how the economies of France and Europe could be made ecologically-sustainable, that is, how they would function without the axiom of eternal growth. Another pivotal issue of this century is the acceleration of economic inequalities, without any doubt a major obstacle in the way of a peaceful transition towards an ecological post-growth world. Thomas Piketty, a professor of economics at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, brilliantly quantified the problem in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” and proposed pathways towards its resolution, such as the instauration of a global tax on wealth. His work went to inspire the economic policy of 2020 US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. Beyond academic debates, Europe has also been a fertile ground for citizen and political action. Circular economy initiatives have flourished in many European cities, and Europe was a pioneer in adoption of waste recycling and valorisation practices; both key enablers of a post-growth world. Denmark and the Netherlands have also led the charge on sustainable mobility for several decades, with bicycle infrastructure, train and public transport networks being developed to the point where owning a car barely even makes sense anymore. Under the leadership of their socialist mayors, major metropolises such as Paris or Barcelona are also undergoing massive transformations to make the individual car obsolete.

By contrast, few, if any, notable circular economy initiatives are heard about in the US, and what little ecological debate there is focuses on incentivising the use of marginally less polluting alternatives of current technologies, rather than on questioning the well-foundedness of the current system. On mobility, the total reliance on unsustainable means of transportation for both intra-city and inter-city trips, that is, cars and airplanes, and the total absence of any serious support for developing public transport and rail networks to levels seen in Europe or Asia offers little reasons to be hopeful. In the country where 50% of the area of an average city is dedicated to cars alone, there doesn’t even seem to be much of an awareness of how pervasive car dependence is. The lack of sustainable mobility initiatives may not be so surprising, however, given the absence of a significant green party to push these issues into the political arena, which is dominated by a duopoly comprised of the Republicans (far-right) and Democrats (centre). On the academic front, much of the intellectual output of the US left seems to be directed at issues such as racial and gender rights, which were settled 20 years ago or more on this side of the Atlantic. Most of Europe has reached a point where having LGBT people in high-ranking governmental positions is considered so normal it is hardly even talked about anymore. Indeed, when Petra de Sutter was appointed deputy prime minister of Belgium earlier this year, mentions of her being a trans woman came mostly from Anglo-American press; Belgian newspapers focusing on her career and talent as a deal-broker instead, as they would with any other member of the government regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. More politically, issues like universal healthcare, abolition of death penalty, or affordable education are still highly contentious in the US whereas they have been making consensus across the whole political spectrum in EU countries for a long time: Europe can now focus on the next steps. The situation is naturally not perfect in the EU as a whole, as attested by the situation in Poland and Hungary, but the actions of these governments are denounced from all sides, and more importantly, these countries are unable to influence the state of the discourse elsewhere in any significant way.

If I point out the ideas that occupy the US left were internalised in Europe several decades ago, those discussed by the US right, on the other hand, are squarely stuck in the nineteenth century, and it can be affirmed without much restrain that the societal debate amongst US conservatives in the last decades has really produced nothing of value. Not that there hasn’t been attempts. The most notable of which has been the promotion of the “Third Culture” by the likes of John Brockmann and Jeffrey Epstein. Starting from Charles Snow’s these of the “Two Cultures”, which discusses how twentieth-century Western philosophical discourse has been shaped by a schism between “literary” and “scientific” academics, advocates of the Third Culture posit that tech billionaires and software moguls have an equally-prominent place in the realm of philosophical ideas: far from being mere money-making schemes, talks of connecting all humans on social media, logging all geographical data on privately-owned servers, or developing advanced AI capable of predicting economic events, would come from profound ontological reflections on the human condition. On environmental issues, Silicon Valley companies are convinced that producing hundreds of millions of smartphones per year, billions of microchips, and operating millions of servers to satisfy growing needs for computational power and data storage comes at a zero ecological cost as long as solar panels are being installed atop their headquarters. These kinds of ideas have been widely propagated through media like TED conferences. It is, of course, all a sham. The veneer of intellectuality and progressiveness that Third Culture proponents tried to apply on plain and simple free-market capitalism rapidly dissolved when scandals such as Cambridge Analytica or the Epstein affair were revealed, and the “tech” world was exposed for what it is: a cash-making industry like any other.

Of course, the European progressive would naturally cheer any development that goes in the direction of a fairer US society, but if in search of inspiration, will likely be frustrated at the lack of novel ideas coming from across the Atlantic. On the left: the reanalysis of every issue through the prism of identity politics and critical theory, on the right: the repackaging of libertarian ideas that become outdated as soon as they are broadcast. The New World, it seems, is decidedly still engulfed in old battles.

As the US busies itself with solving yesteryear’s issues, then, leaving Europe as the thought leader on societal solutions to the climate emergency, let us hope for the planet’s sake that Europe has what it takes to make itself heard, and that “what happens in Europe happens in America ten years later” will become an adequate summary of transatlantic exchanges of ideas.