ESA's Mission

Brett Davidson

Brett Davidson

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While it's the 'European Space Agency', ESA is not to be confused with the European Union, so it includes the UK - represented by the UK Space Agency (UKSA). Certainly it's very much looser than NASA or any national space agency. Nonetheless it has its own aims and aspirations. For a snapshot of its latest vision, adopted unanimously on 19 November 2021 at ESA’s Intermediate Ministerial Meeting in Portugal, see:

https://www.science.org/content/art...n-astronauts-amid-ambitious-accelerator-plans
https://www.euractiv.com/section/gl...esto-accelerating-the-use-of-space-in-europe/
Key features: independent European crewed access to space, sample return from ice moons of the outer planets as part of the search for life.
 
Addendum. I wouldn't be unhappy if they dusted off the plans for Hermes and stripped it back to basics. It seems to have been a classic example of mission creep - from a crew transport to space to being a space station. Otherwise, there have been various capsule designs.

The question is how ESA is going to deal with commercial space. Ariane 6 is obsolete before it even launches and European startups have been unremarkable. The major companies like Airbus haven't had much in that direction either. Reaction Engines might be a prospect, but Skylon as an operational system is more an aspiration than a plan. They've concentrated on propulsion, sensibly - and successfully - limiting themselves to an achievable incremental development pathway that can attract real investment along the way. This declaration might change things.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this Matosinhos manifesto manifests.
 
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Rhinocrates said:
Addendum. I wouldn't be unhappy if they dusted off the plans for Hermes and stripped it back to basics. It seems to have been a classic example of mission creep - from a crew transport to space to being a space station. Otherwise, there have been various capsule designs.
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The reason they had mission creep was because they never knew what the mission was and kept searching for one.
If the goal was to get European astronauts into space on a European spacecraft, they could have/should have started with something simpler and cheaper.
 
blackstar said:
Rhinocrates said:
Addendum. I wouldn't be unhappy if they dusted off the plans for Hermes and stripped it back to basics. It seems to have been a classic example of mission creep - from a crew transport to space to being a space station. Otherwise, there have been various capsule designs.
Click to expand...
The reason they had mission creep was because they never knew what the mission was and kept searching for one.
If the goal was to get European astronauts into space on a European spacecraft, they could have/should have started with something simpler and cheaper.
Click to expand...
Over a quarter century ago I wrote a paper on this very topic:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1995SpPol..11..171B/abstract
A copy can be found here:

https://zh.booksc.eu/book/16375740/433f55
An IAF precursor of that paper got me two mentions in Luc van den Abeelen's book "Spaceplane HERMES", and the Space Policy version is citation #1 in Wikipedia's Hermes entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_(spacecraft) (and no, I did not edit that page). At the time I heard that some people in France were none too happy about a German aerospace engineer publicly performing an independent postmortem of that program...

Martin
 
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Flyaway said:
Relevant to this thread.

A Paralympic sprinter from the UK has been named among the latest intake of astronauts recruited by the European Space Agency.

John McFall, 41, becomes the first astronaut with a physical disability, or para-astronaut, to be recruited by the space agency in a drive to overcome the barriers that prevent disabled people from participating in space missions.

Also joining the astronaut class of 2022, the agency’s first new recruits since 2009, is Dr Rosemary Coogan, 31, who spent time in the Royal Navy reserve and gained a PhD in astronomy before working at the French Space Agency.

Coogan becomes the first UK woman to join ESA as a career astronaut and the second person from the UK to join the agency’s astronaut corps after Tim Peake, a member of the class of 2009.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science...te-from-uk-in-latest-intake-of-esa-astronauts
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ESA science missions get green light for new discoveries (M7)

Plasma Observatory – sailing the shores of the cosmic ocean

Medium-class missions form the backbone of ESA’s Science Programme. Those currently flying include Solar Orbiter and Euclid, ESA's dark Universe detective.

Back in 2023, the space science community narrowed down the shortlist for the next medium-class mission to three finalists. Since then, scientists and engineers have been carefully considering all three in terms of science, technical feasibility and how well they complement other missions.

Based on this assessment, ESA has proposed to the Science Programme Committee that Plasma Observatory be selected. The Committee has taken note of this recommendation and will make the formal decision at the next meeting in November 2026.

Plasma Observatory would study how electrically charged particles (plasma) from the Sun interact with the protective magnetic bubble (the magnetosphere) that surrounds Earth. In particular, it would look at how the plasma gains energy through its interaction with Earth's magnetic field, how this energy enters and moves around the magnetosphere, and how it spreads to other particles around Earth.

Previous missions, including ESA's Cluster, found that these interactions happen on different scales in space and time – from a few kilometres up to tens of thousands, and from milliseconds to minutes. But Cluster – made up of four spacecraft – could only study one scale at a time. Plasma Observatory would be a constellation of seven spacecraft, making it the first mission capable of studying the interactions on different scales of space and time simultaneously, to give us a detailed understanding of what exactly is happening and how the scales are connected.

Plasma makes up 99% of the visible Universe, and the transfer of energy within it governs how pretty much everything in the Universe works. Plasma Observatory is using the magnetosphere as a laboratory for understanding the wider Universe, including the Sun, exploding stars and distant galaxies. Find out more about Plasma Observatory here.

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/m7-public-presentation
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