Cash-Short Europe Takes Aim at the Moon

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/business/global/cash-short-europe-takes-aim-at-the-moon.html

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PARIS — Forty years after humans last walked on the Moon, Europe’s space industry is hoping to play a key role in the resumption of manned lunar exploration planned for later this decade. But whether cash-strapped governments are prepared to pay for out-of-this-world projects remains unclear.

Science ministers from the 20 member states of the European Space Agency gather Tuesday in Naples for a two-day meeting where they will be asked to approve a budget of up to €12 billion, or $15.3 billion, for the next three years that would include financing for dozens of programs, including a new lunar crew transport vehicle, at least two Mars exploration missions and a successor to Europe’s highly successful Ariane 5 rocket.

By comparison, the U.S. space agency, NASA, had a budget of $18 billion for the 2012 fiscal year.

“I am not living on a different planet,” Jean-Jacques Dordain, the E.S.A.’s director general, said in an interview at the agency’s headquarters here. “I know the difficulties of people. I read the newspapers. The economic situation will have an impact.”

Until the global economic crisis struck four years ago, the E.S.A. had been able to count on steady increases to its annual budget, which today stands at just over €4 billion. But industry executives predict that the fiscal and deficit pact forged this year to save the euro will most likely require several member states to reduce their financing of space programs. Mr. Dordain said he hoped the ministers in Naples would approve a budget of at least €10 billion through 2015 — an average of €3.3 billion a year.

The E.S.A.’s origins date from the late 1960s as the European countries with significant space expertise — particularly Britain, France, Germany and Italy — began to fear being left behind as the United States and Soviet Union channeled enormous financial and technological resources into their Cold War space race. The agency receives three-fourths of its budget directly from member states and the rest from the European Union and a handful of cooperating states.

In Europe, more than 30,000 people are directly employed by the space industry and a further 300,000 people work in space-related sectors like satellite operations and an array of navigation, communications and Earth observation services.

Part of Mr. Dordain’s mission this week will be to reassure governments that the often high upfront costs of the E.S.A.’s projects, which focus heavily on developing and launching satellites for earth observation and telecommunications, deliver tangible gains for European businesses. The European Union estimates, for example, that the €5 billion Galileo satellite navigation system — a competitor to the Global Positioning System of the United States — will generate €90 billion in economic benefits over the next 20 years.

European companies have a 40 percent share of the global market in commercial satellite launchings, and economists say the revenue they generate is roughly 20 times the cost of the launchings themselves.

Space investment, Mr. Dordain said, “is not the man on the moon — it is down to earth.” While the E.S.A. has always made its main priority the pursuit of knowledge about the Earth and the solar system, the current crisis has added another: leveraging space investments to enhance the competitiveness of European companies.

It is a message, he said, that some European governments are coming to grasp. This month, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced plans to increase London’s contribution to the E.S.A.’s budget by 25 percent over the next two years. The larger contribution is expected to translate into more research contracts for British companies, the fruits of which could be commercialized into new products and services.

Even the most audacious space-exploration missions have yielded technologies that have later found earthbound applications in areas like mobile communications, optics, robotics, energy generation and propulsion systems. That remains the main argument for continued European participation in projects like the International Space Station and forthcoming missions to the Moon, Mars and Mercury.

Perhaps the most ambitious project on Mr. Dordain’s wish list is a €450 million proposal to build, together with NASA, a space vehicle that would transport up to four astronauts on missions as long as six months. Its first mission, envisioned for around 2020, would bring the first humans to the Moon since the U.S. Apollo space program ended in 1972. The spacecraft could be modified in later years for manned missions to Mars or one of the asteroids.

Other proposals on the table this week include €100 million to finance the first phase of development for a robotic lander that would explore the Moon’s south pole, which some scientists believe may harbor ancient deposits of ice. An initial feasibility study for the lander was awarded in 2010 to Astrium, a unit of European Aeronautic Defense & Space.

“I have more ideas than member states have money,” Mr. Dordain said.

A rocket scientist who has trained as an astronaut, Mr. Dordain, 66, was in primary school when the Soviet Union lofted Sputnik in 1957. He earned his engineering degree on July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.

While he continues to press the case for space investment to European leaders, he concedes that it is impossible to put a price tag on the thrill of exploration that inspired his own career — and that the E.S.A. aims to harness by encouraging young Europeans to become scientists and engineers.

“You cannot put an economic value on providing dreams,” he said.