PARIS
- With fresh money from its member governments and an apparently renewed
enthusiasm among microgravity scientists, the European Space Agency (ESA)
expects to send out requests for ideas by midyear on how to use Europe's
Columbus laboratory aboard the International Space Station in the coming years.
The
arrival
of Columbus at the space station in February 2008, and the successful
docking and undocking of Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) cargo
carrier, have rekindled enthusiasm for microgravity experiments, ESA Human Spaceflight
Director Simonetta DiPippo said. "What we have seen is a rapid increase in
the number of experiment proposals compared to several years ago," she
said.
ESA
governments in November agreed to spend 285 million euros ($370.3 million)
on microgravity missions between 2009 and 2011. In addition to funding hardware
to be sent to the space station, the money will pay for parabolic flights of
candidate experiments aboard Europe's Airbus 300 Zero-G jet aircraft, and for
other ground-based experiment settings.
Germany,
which is leading Europe's space station work - but for awhile appeared to have
lost its enthusiasm - has a renewed appetite for station-related
investment and not only through ESA.
In
December, the German Aerospace Center, DLR, agreed to a joint development with
the China Manned Space Engineering Office of experiments to be launched aboard China's Shenzhou
8 manned capsule in 2011. DLR said the agreement, covering 17 medical and
biological experiments, is just the start of a long-term collaboration with
China's manned space program.
ESA
for now has not joined China on any manned space projects, but remains open to
the possibility. But the agency is pushing ahead on several fronts that could
move Europe closer to its own astronaut-carrying
capability.
The
approval of the microgravity funding package was one of several programs
relating to astronauts that ESA governments agreed to back. The others include:
- 1.37 billion euros to assure ESA meets its obligation
to the international space station's lead agency, NASA, to provide four
more ATV flights between now and 2015. This financing will not pay for
all four ATVs and their Ariane 5 launch vehicles, because ESA governments
wanted to wait for clarification from NASA on how long the station will be
operated. But at the insistence of Germany, ESA governments agreed that
complementary funding would be made available if ATV contracting teams
work faster than expected and need more funding before 2011.
- 27 million euros to study modifications needed to
permit the ATV cargo carrier, which is filled with garbage and
destroyed in a controlled atmospheric re-entry after spending up to
six months at the station, to return cargo to Earth. Contracts for this
work are scheduled to be let starting in mid-2009, DiPippo said.
- 5 million euros to investigate ways to work with
Russia on a new
crew transport vehicle. Gone for now is any idea of a major joint
venture to produce a successor to Russia's Soyuz capsule.
ESA
and Russia spent three years in stop-and-start negotiations on such an idea,
but European government officials said squabbling over work share among
European companies, combined with technology-export restrictions in Russia and
Europe, helped scuttle the proposal.
Another
problem was that the European side had been tentatively assigned the job of
designing a service module for the crewed vehicle that used a future Russian
rocket, now being designed, as the point of reference. Europe wanted to work on
hardware that would use ATV as a starting point, and Europe's Ariane 5 rocket
as the presumed launcher.
But
with European governments still hesitant about embarking on their own program
to assure autonomy in manned access to space, ESA officials are continuing to
explore ways to work with Russia on a crew transport system.
- 11.5 million euros to begin work on a lunar lander.
While not an astronaut program at the outset, ESA is funding this work
with a view to participating in a global exploration effort to the Moon,
and to Mars. An exploration conference in June in Prague is expected to
refine an ongoing coordination among 14 space powers, including the United
States, Russia, China, Japan and India as well as Europe, in future
exploration plans.
Germany
is financing most of the ESA lunar-lander study, with Portugal also
participating in the work. The lander design will assume a launch aboard
Europe's Ariane 5 rocket.
advertisement
