Courtesy of the European Space Agency THE BIG GUN Night falls on the latest, most powerful version of Europe's Ariane 5 rocket, being readied for liftoff from the Guiana Space Centre off the northern coast of South America. The rocket has two solid-fuel boosters and a main tank that carries 173 tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen. That fuel is fed into the new Vulcain 2 engine—the engine that may carry European astronauts to Mars. |
At six foot two, André Kuipers does not necessarily stand out among his dutch compatriots at a cocktail party, but as an astronaut he is a giant. He is also something of a hometown hero in the Netherlands. Kuipers is one of 13 European astronauts who proudly work alongside their American and Russian colleagues on the International Space Station. In his most recent assignment, he spent nine days aboard the station and performed nearly two dozen science, engineering, and education experiments.
Kuipers's journey to the station and back was rather less than heroic, however. He had to ride aboard a cramped, Soviet-designed Soyuz capsule, his knees almost touching his chest. He did not mind the tight quarters as much as the knowledge that the capsule's navigation system sometimes goes on the fritz. When that happens on the descent, the capsule shifts into an automatic corkscrew pattern, which puts a whopping 8 g's on the three astronauts stuffed inside. Even the Soyuz's normal 4-g plunge is enough to make a hardened test pilot uncomfortable. Kuipers experienced 8 g's on a military jet during training, and he remembers having particular trouble doing two things: staying conscious and breathing.
To Kuipers and many other aspiring explorers within the European Space Agency, this odd mixture of inspiration and indignity suggests that the time has come for the agency to aim higher. Working with a modest budget of less than $4 billion a year—a fourth of what NASA spends—the ESA has already made itself a powerhouse in unmanned space missions. The Ariane 4 rocket was one of the most reliable ever built; its successor, the Ariane 5, is among the most powerful. Last January, ESA's Huygens probe executed a deft descent to the surface of Saturn's methane-shrouded moon, Titan. The agency's Smart-1 spacecraft, currently conducting a survey of our moon, sports a pathbreaking ion-propulsion engine. What the Europeans do not have is a shuttlelike orbiter or Apollo-like crew capsule to place atop the Ariane 5. But that, too, is coming.
As ESA engineers begin building a giant cargo vessel for large loads going to and from the space station, they are also looking at how it can be adapted to carry astronauts and become Europe's first manned spacecraft. The Europeans are also negotiating with Russia to collaborate on the Clipper space plane, currently under development. It is designed to carry a six-person crew to low Earth orbit. The ESA Council has recently approved the Aurora program, a plan for a succession of increasingly bold expeditions, including a robotic Mars sample return mission, a manned trip to the moon, and a manned voyage to Mars in 2033. "Europeans take great pride in seeing our astronauts in space," says Daniel Sacotte, ESA's director of human spaceflight, microgravity, and exploration. "The exploration of space is a high priority."
A lot of the new can-do attitude in the European space program is about symbolism. European nations have struggled for decades to fashion a coherent political union that wields influence on the world stage on a par with the United States. The European Union's disparate and ancient nations have succeeded in competing economically in recent years but have failed so far to find political common ground, as demonstrated by last spring's defeat of the European constitution. What the politicians have tried to do is to get all Europeans—from English bankers to Polish farmers—to think of themselves as a single people. That effort might get a big boost from a shared, inspirational goal, like putting a human on Mars on a spaceship bearing the European logo.
Mars is not an impossible dream for ESA. Airbus and Ariane have established Europe as a big player in the aerospace industry. Meanwhile, the Europeans' main competitors face plenty of troubles of their own. NASA's budgets are woefully underfunded for a manned mission to the Red Planet, and Russia has been struggling to cope with problems more urgent than space exploration. Although China has succeeded where Europe has not by placing a man in orbit, its overall program remains far less technologically sophisticated than ESA's.
The main obstacle to Europe's grand plans is money. Squabbling among member nations has strained ESA's budget, forcing it to create dual-purpose programs, such as a space station cargo module that could eventually double as a crew orbiter for European astronauts. The program, called Aurora, which is supposed to get ESA to Mars, has only $1 billion to spend between now and 2010. To realize its complex and demanding goals, Europe will either have to invest more or collaborate with other space-faring nations, which could include Russia, China, Japan, Canada, India, and of course, the United States.
Europe's strategy to wean itself from its reliance on NASA and the Russian Space Agency goes back at least four decades, to the earliest engineering efforts that led up to the development of the first Ariane rocket. Sacotte, at the time a minor official at the French Space Ministry, recalls a 1970s visit by James Fletcher,
THE FERRY INTO SPACE (CARGO ONLY, FOR NOW)
Ferit Kuyas These two views show Europe's new space-cargo carrier, the Jules Verne, undergoing testing at the European Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk in the Netherlands. It will be exposed to extreme heat and cold, vibration, radiation, and vacuum to make sure the design is robust. In one view (above) the carrier's avionics module is exposed. |
Ferit Kuyas Meanwhile, a scale model of the cargo carrier undergoes shake tests (above) to simulate the effects of a rocket launch. The Jules Verne will fit atop an Ariane rocket and carry supplies to the International Space Station, freeing the Europeans from their dependence on NASA's space shuttle and Russia's Progress supply ship. With some significant modifications, this basic design could incorporate a crew capsule to carry astronauts to Earth orbit, to the moon, and beyond. |
Now NASA is again in the doldrums, and Europe still lacks the capability to launch its own crew. Sacotte and other ESA officials can barely hide their frustration—not only with NASA but with themselves for not having moved more quickly to build their own astronaut vehicle. By now, European astronauts had hoped to be established in their space laboratory called Columbus, where they would be melting and solidifying conductive metals, studying microgravity effects on single-celled organisms, investigating human balance disorders, and carrying out dozens of other experiments. When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry in February 2003, Columbus was waiting to be prepped at the Kennedy Space Center. It's still waiting, under wraps. Although Europe has the potent Ariane 5 rocket, it needs the space shuttle's sizable cargo bay to loft the 20,000-pound Columbus module. NASA's continuing problem with foam shedding from the shuttle's main fuel tank has delayed a follow-up to last August's flight of Discovery. Columbus still does not even have a target launch date.
President George W. Bush raised the competitive stakes in space with a speech he gave on January 15, 2004. Citing the spirit of Lewis and Clark, he announced a plan to send people back to the moon and said, "The desire to explore and understand is part of our character." Then he asked "other nations to join us on this journey, in a spirit of cooperation and friendship." Some Europeans saw in his words a new American quest for hegemony in space, if not a swipe at the Chinese, who have made no bones about their desire to establish lunar colonies. But the announcement oddly echoed the sentiment behind the Aurora program. The executive summary of the first Aurora planning document states, "The desire to explore is a fundamental heritage of the European people."
A foretaste of looming rivalry brings out the alpha-male instincts of the soft-spoken Sacotte. Europe, he says, no longer looks to commercial spin-offs of the research on the International Space Station as its primary motivation for sending humans into space. Instead, the "search for territory," has become more important than the search for knowledge: "The search for territory is basic for animals and for mankind. Accessibility of space is a question of technology, and when the technology exists, it is used. So I say, let's go for having the territory. It's nothing more than that. That's what's motivating George W. Bush. And I don't want to be left out."
Before Bush brought up the subject, Europe's position was that it was more interested in a long-term, science-based mission to Mars than a return to the moon. Now ESA is shifting its thinking and trying to leverage the technology at hand into a manned vehicle that would also prove useful for a moon mission and, conveniently, fit on top of the Ariane 5 rocket. The key technology is already far along in development: the automated transport vehicle, a cargo ship being designed to replace Progress, Russia's archaic unmanned supply ship, as the main tool for ferrying water, food, and equipment to the space station. The Jules Verne is the first of six transport vehicles Europe expects to build. It is undergoing tests at the European Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk, a seaside resort town in the Netherlands, and its maiden voyage is expected to take place next year.
