PARIS — The 17-nation European Space Agency (ESA) is scheduled to
begin a year-long astronaut selection process May 19 and already is being asked
to confront a nightmare scenario: that a British citizen emerges among the best
candidates.
Now Britain's Royal Aeronautical
Society (RAS) has written the equivalent of a screenplay for turning ESA's bad
dream into a full-length horror film. In a paper to be published May 1 in its Aerospace
Magazine, the RAS Space Group Committee says a British astronaut trained by
ESA could get an early trip to the Moon as part of NASA's Constellation program
following a bilateral cooperation accord on a robotic lunar mission between
NASA and Britain.
According to the RAS, NASA
Administrator Michael Griffin floated this idea in 2007 as a carrot to
encourage Britain to invest in lunar robotic technologies alongside NASA, after
which the U.S. agency could offer a British national a place on a manned NASA
lunar mission.
The British government has remained
firmly, and vocally, outside of all astronaut-related programs in Europe for more than two decades, with successive British governments concluding that human
spaceflight is more expensive than it is worth. Britain even declined to invest
in Europe's Ariane 5 rocket because its original design was based on carrying a
crew-transport vehicle.
In recent months, however, British
government officials have indicated a willingness to review their position. The
United Kingdom and NASA in April 2007 signed an agreement to investigate
cooperating on robotic lunar missions. It was at this point that Griffin made what RAS refers to as "this remarkable offer."
"A shorter-term involvement in
NASA's Constellation programme on the basis of robotic technology could offer
British citizens the chance to become astronauts, with the Moon as the
potential destination," says the paper, which, according to RAS Space
Group Committee Chairman Pat Norris of Logica plc, was approved by Griffin.
"As explained by Dr. Griffin,
one straightforward arrangement would be for a UK astronaut to be chosen in the
next round of ESA
astronaut selection. Clearly the details of this opportunity need to be
assessed before committing funds, but human spaceflight does seem achievable
without the need for the budget normally associated with such activities."
To the dismay of other ESA member
states, and particularly Germany, Italy and France, Britain has gone
"without the need for the budget" for astronaut programs for years
while these nations have spent billions on the Spacelab laboratory launched
aboard the U.S. space shuttle, a 20-year commitment to the international space
station and their own national astronaut programs.
ESA already is scrambling to find
additional astronaut slots at the international space station. Its 8.3 percent
ownership stake in the non-Russian section of the orbital complex gives it the
right to launch one astronaut every two years — for a period of six months —
starting in 2009 when the station's permanent crew size increases to six from
the current three.
It remains unclear whether ESA's
policy of distributing contracts according to each nation's financial
participation in a program applies to selecting astronauts as well.
But ESA officials concede that any
selection of a British astronaut without an accompanying agreement by the
British government to make a big financial contribution to ESA's human
spaceflight program would not be well received in Germany, Italy and France, which are also the agency's three biggest overall contributors.
And if Britain's ambition in joining
ESA's astronaut corps simply was to get low-cost training for a NASA-U.K.
mission with no ESA involvement, the opposition would be that much greater.
Michel Tognini, a former French
astronaut and now head of the European Astronaut Center in Cologne, Germany, anticipated this issue in a November space-exploration conference in Berlin.
Addressing David Williams, the
director-general of the British National Space Centre, Tognini asked:
"Let's suppose that after our one-year selection process, the best
candidate is from the UK: What should we do?"
Clearly surprised, Williams
answered: "We would need to understand what would be the consequences, and
ask our minister. You're asking a very difficult question: What is the added
value in the near term when compared to robotics? But leaving [the selection
process] open to all European candidates is the right way to go about it."
advertisement
