European astronauts state that: “Europe’s Gross Domestic Product is comparable to that of the United States’, but its joint investment in space exploration does not reach even one tenth of NASA’s.”
I agree that is is high that that Europe got their act together to make sure that European ideas and values remain relevant in space.
Can we also have our own Space Station?
Space is a deadly place, double so for humans. Most space exploration and travel in the forseeable future will be done with robots, you know, the kind that wont die just coz there is no air, or no right air, or not enough air, or all the stuff squishy meatbags need.
Let the others have their cock measuring contest with meatbags, focus our effort innstead on better unmanned and autonomous space vehicles.
Meanwhile Spain has two space programs, the Spanish and the Catalan ones instead of a single one.
We are a joke.
This is something I can stand behind. Wish MT was a full member of ESA
This is dumb because we can just hop on something already working. Europe should work on what’s missing. An interplanetary nuclear drive would be nice. Maybe some space health care.
The ESA could have easily certified Ariane 6 for human spaceflight, but for what we know they didn’t. Ariane 5 was certified for human spaceflight on the basis of a French program that never happened. I think that certifying Ariane 6 would have been the bare minimum to show the smallest part of interest towards human spaceflight but nobody is even talking about that; if we don’t want to start now and try with something small with what we already have but want to go with a huge all-encompassing roadmap it’s never going to happen.
In my opinion the hypothesis of partnering with the American Dream Chaser project to adapt the spaceplane to be launched by the ESA (DC4EU) was a good idea that could happen quite soon, and I don’t care if it’s not “wholly European” or whatever.
We really need to spend more on ESA, particularly on our rockets. Starship1 is going to make most other launchers obsolete, possibly even Ariane 6 when it finally is ready. Ariane needs a proper answer to the Starship and it only has an answer to Falcon9
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In their Manifesto found here: [https://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/corporate/ASE_Manifesto.pdf](https://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/corporate/ASE_Manifesto.pdf)
European astronauts state that: “Europe’s Gross Domestic Product is comparable to that of the United States’, but its joint investment in space exploration does not reach even one tenth of NASA’s.”
I agree that is is high that that Europe got their act together to make sure that European ideas and values remain relevant in space.
Can we also have our own Space Station?
Space is a deadly place, double so for humans. Most space exploration and travel in the forseeable future will be done with robots, you know, the kind that wont die just coz there is no air, or no right air, or not enough air, or all the stuff squishy meatbags need.
Let the others have their cock measuring contest with meatbags, focus our effort innstead on better unmanned and autonomous space vehicles.
Meanwhile Spain has two space programs, the Spanish and the Catalan ones instead of a single one.
We are a joke.
This is something I can stand behind. Wish MT was a full member of ESA
This is dumb because we can just hop on something already working. Europe should work on what’s missing. An interplanetary nuclear drive would be nice. Maybe some space health care.
The ESA could have easily certified Ariane 6 for human spaceflight, but for what we know they didn’t. Ariane 5 was certified for human spaceflight on the basis of a French program that never happened. I think that certifying Ariane 6 would have been the bare minimum to show the smallest part of interest towards human spaceflight but nobody is even talking about that; if we don’t want to start now and try with something small with what we already have but want to go with a huge all-encompassing roadmap it’s never going to happen.
In my opinion the hypothesis of partnering with the American Dream Chaser project to adapt the spaceplane to be launched by the ESA (DC4EU) was a good idea that could happen quite soon, and I don’t care if it’s not “wholly European” or whatever.
We really need to spend more on ESA, particularly on our rockets. Starship1 is going to make most other launchers obsolete, possibly even Ariane 6 when it finally is ready. Ariane needs a proper answer to the Starship and it only has an answer to Falcon9