Any person following announcements from ESA or the EU on the European space sector with sufficient regularity will have remarked there is one idea that keeps being hammered over and over again with relentless insistence: that space activities should support economic growth. This sort of fundamental postulate, on which every new major space programme should apparently be based, is rarely questioned let alone challenged by decision-makers. However, as I will argue in this post, the well-foundedness of this axiom is really not as evident as the big actors of European space and their communications teams think it is.
The problem with economic growth is a subject that has received a lot of academic attention, particularly in Europe, albeit a lot less of political one. This is not the place to extensively review the subject, but the root of the issue is that the idea that technology will allow decoupling between growth of world GDP and emissions of greenhouse gasses and/or destruction of natural habitat, has not been observed, at any point in modern history, despite constant technological progress. In other words, there is no such thing as green growth. The choice between opulence and a liveable climate has been described as almost binary. As an increasing proportion of thinkers are warning about the fundamentally unstable nature of an economy based on eternal, exponential growth (see my previous blog post), and are elaborating on post-growth economic models, ones that are inclusive, fair, and don't threaten to make Earth uninhabitable by the end of the century, one cannot help but be struck by how misplaced the priorities of Europe's space establishment are.
ESA's home page. Notice the delightful contradiction of having "ESA for Earth" and "Economic growth" next to one another.
Indeed, examples abound. The latest one is that the EU has fallen for the recent craze for internet megaconstellations, an unfortunate but perhaps predictable outcome. As SpaceX readies itself to vandalise the night sky at all wavelengths with tens of thousands of low Earth orbit smallsats, cries of protest have emerged from the scientific community to make this orbital rampage illegal. And far from regulating this folly, the EU doubles down with 6 billions € to launch its own constellation, because apparently, being able to play Angry Birds on a smartphone in the Sahara should be Europe's top priority when it comes to space. "Economic growth", we are told. Then, we read press releases of European space officials patting themselves on the back because a UK-based company sold full-body scanners to the US Customs and Border Protection agency. How does that help us better understand the universe? If anything, ESA should work to put growth at the service of the scientific endeavour, instead of the other way around. Another most curious example comes from the Spanish Ingenio satellite, which was lost on 19/11/2020 during the failure of Vega launch VV17, of which Spanish officials said that:
"Although losing SEOSAT-Ingenio is disappointing, the satellite project accomplished economic development goals well before its ill-fated launch. The SEOSAT-Ingenio program has served as a catalyst for Spain’s space industry, which last week secured its first lead role on a Copernicus mission with the awarding of a €380 million prime contract to Madrid-based Airbus Defense and Space Spain for the Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) mission."
It is unclear if Europe will bother with reordering the satellite, but if it had no real purpose besides fuelling growth for the Spanish branch of Airbus, then why even bother launching it? With such a reasoning, I argue it would have been cheaper to simply dump the completed satellite into the sea.
This obsession with economic growth is also visible in more subtle ways. For instance, it is no wonder that Earth Observation and Navigation get the lion's share of ESA's budget, and that ESA remains the only major space agency with a whole directorate focused on telecommunication satellites (a very profitable subfield of space technology). Also symptomatic is the way ESA manages its solar system exploration directorate, a domain which one would expect to be as close to "pure science" as it gets. ESA is indeed apparently content with distributing contracts to its industrial partners for the construction of the spacecraft, but not with supporting the scientific exploitation of their data. It can take a decade for a satellite to start collecting data, but where is the economic growth in analysing them? European scientists are instead redirected to their national funding agencies, smaller bodies with smaller resources, and ultimately, a smaller pool of talent.
Where does that leave the young ambitious European space scientist who simply wants to understand the universe, and doesn't want to be bothered with the well-being of Airbus and Thales Alenia Space shareholders? Paradoxically, one solution is emigration to the United States. While the country is the epitome of the growth-at-all-costs mindset, the institutional space environment is healthier, larger, and more resilient; large enough, at any rate, for someone to reasonably hope to build a career in fields such as human spaceflight if he or she wishes (something that would be very discouraged on this side of the Atlantic). The governmental space ecosystem is such that one has a reasonable chance of entering a space agency to do space science and exploration for the sake of it, outside of outdated economic considerations about this sacro-saint growth.
ESA Council, take heed.
