Paris, Feb 1 (AFP\/APP):As the race to send people to the Moon and beyond heats up, Europe faces calls to make a choice: Keep paying for seats on spacecraft or finally fly its own manned vehicle.<\/p>\n
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Imagine if Christopher Columbus did not have a ship to sail to the Americas, the head of the European Space Agency said recently, lamenting that the continent lacked a vessel to “explore the next frontier”.<\/p>\n
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“We will be on the Moon and we believe we will be living there. We will use the Moon as an economic zone. This is a new frontier,” ESA director general Josef Aschbacher told the 14th European Space Congress last week in Brussels.<\/p>\n
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“The big question is, do we want, as Europeans, to be part of it, or do we want to be watching others going to the Moon?”<\/p>\n
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NASA is aiming to return to the Moon with its Artemis programme by 2025, while China plans to send one of its taikonauts there by 2030.<\/p>\n
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Europe, meanwhile, has no manned vessels to speak of, having relied on US and Russian spacecraft to take more than 30 astronauts into orbit over the years.<\/p>\n
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Private companies have now become major players in the sector, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX taking astronauts to the International Space Station.<\/p>\n
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French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who travelled to and from the ISS aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, has called for more ambition in Europe in terms of crewed flights.<\/p>\n
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European space firm ArianeGroup, owned by Airbus and French group Safran, says it is ready to develop a reusable two-stage launcher capable of carrying astronauts.<\/p>\n
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Philippe Baptiste, president of France’s CNES space agency, says such a launcher would pave the way for Moon and Mars missions, but he said Europe’s space ambitions remain a political question.<\/p>\n
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That question takes on particular significance in the runup to a European space summit in the French city of Toulouse on February 16.<\/p>\n
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An ESA ministerial meeting will be held in November to lay out priorities<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paris, Feb 1 (AFP\/APP):As the race to send people to the Moon and beyond heats up, Europe faces calls to make a choice: Keep paying for seats on spacecraft or finally fly its own manned vehicle. Imagine if Christopher Columbus did not have a […]<\/p>\n
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