The planet-hunting spacecraft mission, called Eddington, had been budgeted at about 200 million euros ($230 million), and the Mercury lander at about 250 million euros. The decision to cancel them will give financial breathing room to a European space-science program that had none.
We knew at the start that our program would leave us very little room for error, ESA Science Director David Southwood said in a Nov. 7 interview. It worked only if almost nothing went wrong. Well, a couple of things did go wrong.
What went wrong were launch delays and instrument cost overruns. ESAs Herschel and Planck science satellites, to be launched together in 2007, have run into trouble with development of their observing instruments, forcing ESA to spend 20 million euros more than planned to assure completion.
An additional 10 million euros more were needed for the agencys Smart-1 technology satellite, now on its way to the moon, because of a six-month launch delay following a December 2002 Ariane 5 launch failure. That same launch failure pushed back by a year the launch of ESAs billion-dollar Rosetta comet-chaser satellite, now set for launch in February. The Rosetta delay -- satellite storage, keeping launch teams together and other charges added 40 million euros to ESAs science program bill.
Pleading exceptional circumstances, Southwood secured a 100-million-euro loan from ESAs general treasury in May, but these funds must be paid back by late 2006.
Adding to the problems was the fact that European companies on contract to ESA for science hardware demanded early payments for their work in return for accepting contract terms favorable to ESA. These early contract payments added about 30 million euros in unanticipated charges to ESAs 2003 bills.
Killing a mission, especially one like Eddington, really hurts, Southwood said. The reaction from the science community, in Europe and elsewhere, has been strong. Eddington would have been center stage in the effort to find Earth-like planets. If there had been any way to keep it, I would have. But the only way would have been to drop LISA, and LISA is Nobel Prize territory.
LISA, or Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will attempt to detect gravity waves from black holes. A Lisa Pathfinder satellite is set for launch in 2007 and the main LISA spacecraft planned for 2012. LISA will now be the only science mission that will be started in the next two years.
The choice before the SPC was relatively simple, said Bo Andersen, a current SPC member and its past president. Do we start LISA Pathfinder, or Eddington? We knew we had a program that had no margins, but the decision was painful. We all knew that Eddington would be world-class and put Europe ahead of the rest of the world in this field.
Andersen said some SPC members are considering whether to propose that future ESA science budgets be spared the consequences of cost problems caused outside the science program -- in this case the Ariane 5 rocket.
The science program has had three big launches on Ariane 5 Cluster 1, Rosetta and Herschel-Planck, and two out of three so far have been painful for us, Andersen said. The 1995 launch of four Cluster science satellites ended in failure when the rocket veered out off course and was destroyed. A new set of Cluster satellites was subsequently built and launched on Soyuz rockets in 2000.
ESAs science budget has been frozen since the mid-1990s at a level of about 370 million euros per year. To this figure is added most of the costs of science satellites observing instruments, financed by national space agencies.
Getting the national agencies to meet their payload-development commitments has been one of Southwoods highest priorities. He said he has given the national agencies until Dec. 15 to commit to providing all the components of an infrared observation instrument to be provided to NASA for the James Webb Space Telescope to be launched around 2010. ESA is also tentatively scheduled to provide an Ariane 5 launch for the mission.
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