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.
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