Creating a Space Race between NASA & the ESA ( European Space Agency)

power101

We (Europe) find ourselves falling behind the USA in technology and engineering progress and have done for decades. The reasons for this stem from the 1940's when many engineers and scientists left Europe after WW2 for the US and then again when the USA had the space race with the Soviet Union which resulted in millions of students moving towards maths, science and engineering in response to the excitement created by the manned and unmanned moon landings between 1958 & 1976. The cost of this program has been returned many times over from the technologies created by the people inspired by this program. Think silicon valley etc.

One thing that I've never really seen compared is the funding difference between NASA and the ESA . Asking the average person how much is spent on either of these organisations they might think hundreds of billions are being allocated as funding. The truth is only .5% of the US federal budget or $17.647 billion is spent on NASA and in Europe the total funding is only €4.433 Billion. Ireland actually contributes 18 million(.4% of budget) per year towards this program. This is only .035% of our total tax take. If Europe increased the program funding up to 20 billion to compete with NASA it would mean Ireland as a proportion contributing roughly 80 million in total per year. Obviously other European nations would need to do the same.

Now I know spending money on a Space program would be extremely difficult especially when competing with social programs, however the long term benefits from this program would vastly outweigh any costs and the increased amount would only total .16% of Irish revenue.

The question is, would a space race to MARS between the US and Europe create the necessary competition to let Europe compete in the Medium to long term with the rest of the world regarding innovation and advancement? I certainly hope so as we cannot continue to rely on others for advances as it leaves us in a continually weakening position whereby one country creates a majority of technology and everyone else falls behind.

nokia69

thats the future of space right there, the European response is below

time will tell which idea is better


The Americans are headed to Mars but there will be no race, unless China or Russia up their game

power101

Absolutely I understand and agree with moving parts of the space programs to private companies as they are often more efficient. In SpaceX's case they are receiving billions in funding from NASA to supply the space station etc so extra funding from the ESA could do the same in Europe. It could be used to fund private enterprises to take risks in order to progress the space program. Risks that they would otherwise not be able to afford to take.

The ultimate idea would be to foster innovation throughout Europe by instilling excitement in the younger generations while taking on these large challenges.

nokia69

SpaceX don't get "funding" from NASA, they get paid to deliver cargo to the ISS, and in a few years they will get paid to send people to the ISS, for this they charge a lower price than their competitors

most of their launches are private satellite launches that have nothing to do with NASA

power101

Ok fair enough..."funding" isn't the right word but I did go on to explain it was for supplying the ISS.

Either way this is getting away from the point which is that it would be extremely cheap relative to European budgets to increase the current ESA budget by a factor of 5 which could then be used to fund private and public organisations with the ultimate aim of growing the next generations interest in Science & Engineering. These will be the pillars to use as a base from which we can compete with the rest of the world in the future and from which tens of thousands of companies and millions of jobs will be created.

Sheeps

There wont be another space race again unless they find oil on the moon.

_Tombstone_

Sheeps wrote: »

There wont be another space race again unless they find oil on the moon.

http://inhabitat.com/could-mining-helium-3-from-the-moon-solve-earths-energy-problems/

Capt'n Midnight

power101 wrote: »

We (Europe) find ourselves falling behind the USA in technology and engineering progress and have done for decades.
....

The question is, would a space race to MARS between the US and Europe create the necessary competition to let Europe compete in the Medium to long term with the rest of the world regarding innovation and advancement? I certainly hope so as we cannot continue to rely on others for advances as it leaves us in a continually weakening position whereby one country creates a majority of technology and everyone else falls behind.

We aren't loosing the space race by a long shot.

The Americans are using lots of foreign tech from Russia/Ukraine. And there's mad money being spent to replace it with domestic stuff most of which was already flight proven. And they still haven't re-developed the capabilities they had with Apollo/Saturn IB.

On the other hand ESA don't pretend that Souyz is theirs. Why re-invent the wheel when you can buy them off the shelf ?

Remember the ATV Europe used to deliver cargo to the ISS ?
Take a wild guess as to what Orion is using as a service module. So ESA are most of the way to manned space flight if they wanted it. Or they could just buy it off the Russians, like NASA do, for a fraction of the development costs.

ESA made the first soft landing on a comet and Arianespace has been wining most of the commercial launches over the last few decades. US space industry is propped up by the Gov't. NASA and the Military more or less have to use US launchers and despite that huge subsidy they aren't commercially competitive.


ESA hasn't really thrown away as much tech or squandered anything like as much as NASA did. Thanks to the delays on the Shuttle they lost skylab. The ISS still doesn't have the same internal volume. And a lot of the ISS depends on the Russians, look at the problems the US has had with ammonia. Also all of long term visits, even during the Shuttle era were done with Soyuz, which also is used as the lifeboat.

ESA has a budget of €4.433 Bn

NASA have way more at $18,010 Bn

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

... Besides the budget is about buying votes, pork barrelling, PR and flying the flag, actual space exploration is useful side effect.
...
It might be interesting to see how much of the NASA budget is Discretionary
ISS/SLS/Orion together take almost half the budget , remembering that the cross agency support is dipped into when there are cost overruns


larger version https://i2.wp.com/www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/NASA-2015_Budget21.jpg