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Europe’s space agency dreams of launching its own astronauts amid ambitious ‘Accelerator’ plans

The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to push the pedal to the metal in its efforts to exploit the cosmos. Ministers from ESA’s 22 member states today put their names to a manifesto that calls for prioritizing three urgent initiatives, dubbed “Accelerators,” aimed at tackling the climate crisis, responding to natural disasters, and protecting spacecraft from orbital debris and damaging space weather. The manifesto aims to speed up plans for a “digital twin of our planet”—an all-encompassing computer model of the entire Earth system—to help figure out how to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

“In times of unprecedented challenges facing Europe and the world at large, it is the moment to contribute with bold, shared ambitions to solutions enabled by space,” write the ministers, who met in Matosinhos, Portugal.

The Matosinhos Manifesto spells out the three initiatives, which it says could “speed up the use of space to solve today’s biggest challenges.” The document—which uses the terms “accelerator” or “accelerating” 16 times in its four pages—includes no specific funding pledges. But it does contain two tentative missions proposals. One is that Europe consider developing its own system for launching astronauts into space. (European astronauts currently fly on craft launched elsewhere.) The other is that ESA send a probe to an icy moon of Jupiter or Saturn and return to Earth with samples. The goal of that mission, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told a press conference today, is to answer the question: “Is there life out there?”

Unlike NASA in the United States, ESA does not have to deal with annual uncertainties about its budget; it gets multiyear spending commitments from its members. But every few years ESA must get 22 governments to come to a consensus on future spending. Its next budget-setting meeting is in November 2022, and today’s gathering was an opportunity for Aschbacher, in the director’s chair since March, to lay out his vision.

The three Accelerators are a big component. The first proposes enhancing the use of data from Earth-observing satellites to tackle the climate crisis, as well as building a digital replica of the planet, which would allow forecasters to predict floods, fires, and droughts days or even years in advance, as well as assessing the impacts of the heating climate. The second calls for making better use of imagery and other data collected from space to deal with natural disasters, such as the floods and wildfires that ravaged Europe this year. The third envisions new ways to defend crewed and robotic spacecraft from space junk orbiting Earth, and from blasts of radiation and charged particles from the Sun.

ESA already has vigorous programs in all these areas, but the manifesto asserts that “right now is the moment to contribute with bold, shared ambitions to solutions enabled by space.”

In proposing that Europe develop its own crewed spacecraft, Aschbacher pointed out that currently only the United States, Russia, and China—plus possibly India soon—can launch astronauts into orbit. “It’s a political decision,” he said, “but does Europe want its own capability?”

Europe has toyed with this idea before. In 1987 it approved the development of the Hermes spaceplane, like a miniature version of NASA’s Shuttle, that would be launched on top of an Ariane 5 rocket. Spiraling costs, and Russian Space Agency offers of cheap rides in Soyuz craft, led to its cancelation in 1992.

ESA is now developing plans for missions to visit icy moons of the gas giant planets as part of its Voyage 2050 science program. But Aschbacher suggested that, because of the desire to discover possible life in the Solar System, those plans should be expedited and that any mission should bring samples home.

Planetary scientist Athena Coustenis of the Paris Observatory says European teams are focusing on a visit to Enceladus, a moon of Saturn with a liquid water ocean just below its surface. The NASA-ESA Cassini mission flew past Enceladus multiple times and sampled hydrocarbon-laden water thrown up from its surface. It is “currently the most viable candidate for a habitable environment in the outer Solar System,” she says. (NASA, in contrast, is targeting Jupiter’s moon Europa.)

To bring a piece of Enceladus back to Earth, European researchers hope to use similar techniques to those in the upcoming NASA-ESA Mars sample return mission. From “a sample return we will learn much more about habitable conditions in the undersurface liquid water ocean of the moon,” Coustenis says.

Whether Europe will ultimately come up with the money to realize the space agency’s need for speed, however, won’t be known until a year from now at the earliest.

Source: Science Mag