Euromoon 2000

Euromoon 2000 was an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA) in the 1990s aiming to land a robotic craft at the Aitken Basin near the Moon's south pole in the year 2000. The budget for the mission was never found but the efforts made at that time are certainly relevant to European team wishing to compete in the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP).

The mission was envisioned as true partnership between space agency and industry where they both shared the initial costs and any potential financial returns. It also invited additional sponsorship from the European Union, the commercial sphere and the general public. The estimated cost was one ECU per European citizen, which at that time would have equated to around 250 million Euros.

The mission comprised two spacecraft, a lunar Orbiter and a lunar Lander, which were both launched on an Ariane 4 (the no longer operating predescesor to the Ariane 5). After a two-month phase orbiting the Moon and collecting topographical and geographical data, the Lander would separate from the Orbiter and land at a peak of eternal light. Once on the surface, scientific instruments would be used to search for frozen volatiles such as water. The Lander would also carry multiple robotic payloads for a exploration competition called the 'Millennium Challenge', which would have involved a robotic race to the Moon's South Pole.

The efforts to develop the Euromoon 2000 mission plan were led by the Dutch Astronaut Wubbo Ockels, who assembled a team of over 25 engineers and scientists from ESA and industry to make a preliminary mission assessment study, building upon some related studies that took place in the preceding years.

By lobbying the delegates of the various nations that make up ESA, Ockels was able to get the Euromoon 2000 project on the agenda of the ESA Ministerial Council of 1997 with a request for 50 million Euros (the remaining 200 million was to come from private industry). However, much to the dissapointment of the project participants, the ministers present at the council meeting voted not to support the project with any ESA money.

By assembling a sizeable interdisciplinary team working together in one room, the Euromoon 2000 project was the first attempt to do concurrent engineering in ESA and played a major role in the creation of ESA's Concurrent Engineering Facility (CDF), which is still led today by the deputy project manager of Euromoon 2000, Massimo Bandecchi.

Project Enterprize - Privately Funded European Space Tourism

Project Enterprise is a German/Swiss/Austrian collaboration started in 2004 as Europe's first privately funded spaceflight project with the goal of carrying out sub orbital flights for space tourism and scientific experiments.
Website: http://www.european-spacetourism.eu/i... (in German only)
Google translation

Is Space Exploration Expensive?

We are used to the concept of space exploration being a very expensive endevour, but this simple inflation-adjusted monetary comparison by Voltage shows that the complete budget history of NASA, including the entire Apollo Program, is only a fraction of the 2008 bailout of the US finacial sector.

ESA Shows Its Worth to the Ministerial Council

With timing designed to coincide with this coming week's Ministerial Council Meeting, the European Space Agency (ESA) has released this promotional video showing some footage from its recent projects, and some nice computer graphics of the projects for which it will request budget lines.

Of course, this video is far more exciting and adventurous that the very dry and business-like "programmatic priorities" to be presented to the Ministerial Council, which are to:

• further develop the benefits of space to society and the knowledge economy, stimulating innovation, creativity and growth;
• promote the development of new products and services benefiting daily life;
• be increasingly successful on the global market in space systems, services and applications;
• meet its defence and security needs for space; and
• provide continued access to space.
  

Space exploration itself fits only as sub-categories in the programmatic priorities of contributing to the knowledge-based society and providing access to space.

ESA's exploration objectives are to make full use of the International Space Station (ISS) to prepare for future exploration activities and to start the definition of a new cargo return transportation system derived from the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) that will be able to survive re-entry and land intact with payloads brought back from the ISS.

ESA also proposes to study technologies for the exploration of the Moon and to promote lunar exploration in tandem with the recruitment of new astronauts. To this end, ESA wants to study a Moon lander and to develop capabilities enabling human exploration including Moon-landing technologies, habitation and life support systems and demonstrators.

Scenario and architecture studies are also proposed to prepare future activities. ESA wants to become a leading participant in the robotic exploration of planet Mars (currently a field almost totally dominated by NASA), with the Enhanced ExoMars mission and eventually leading to significant European role in a Mars Sample Return mission.

ESA Moon Rover Competition won by University of Bremen Team

A rover designed and built by a team from the University of Bremen has been announced as the winner of the ESA's Robotics Challenge, held last October in Tenerife.

The competition highlighted a specially large variety of rover concepts and designs (not all of which were successful) and the ability of the young student teams to conceive and assemble innovative rovers in a small amount of time.

This competition shows the benefits of exchanges between space agencies, small universities and research centres, people who are just waiting for a chance like the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) to finally get a large acknowledgement for their efforts!

Travelling through the Universe with Celestia Space Simulator

Are you interested in astronomy, the solar system, and space? Would you like to fly through the universe and observe our blue planet, the Moon, or the Milky Way from the outside? Then this free software application might be very interesting for you: Celestia is a 3D space simulator that runs on your Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux computer.



It contains almost 120,000 star positions collected by European Space Agency’s Hipparcos Space Astrometry Mission. It contains moons, asteroids, and even spacecraft, including their orbital paths, just to name a few. It can animate the constellations in real time as well as simulate object movements with much faster or slower velocity. Furthermore, additional information about these objects, craters, landing sites, observatories, etc. can also be displayed.



The software is open source, therefore many add-ons like high-detail textures for planets, satellites and their orbits, spacecraft, or animations are available. Anybody with programming skills can download the source code and further develop the software; even NASA and ESA use Celestia for creating animations, for Mars Express, for example.

So have a look at http://www.shatters.net/celestia, try out the software, and let us know what you think about it! And many thanks to the developers of this great simulator!

WALL-E - The Future of European Space Exploration?

Continuing our theme about rover comparisons from our recent post, today we take a look at that cute animated robot called WALL-E who recently hit the cinemas around the world. WALL-E, created by Pixar Animation Studios, is a fictional robotic character designed to clean up Earth after it becomes polluted by future humanity. In addition to being the character's name, WALL-E is also an acronym for "Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class".

For the sake of comparison, we show below the fictional WALL-E with the "real" ExoMars rover currently being developed by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The ExoMars mission is still under development by ESA. Previously we were given a very exotic and aerodynamic "Artists Impression" of ExoMars (left image). More recently, after more engineers got their hands on the design, ESA released its Phase B1 design (center image) which has replaced all the nice curves with hard 90 degree angles. Interestingly, the ExoMars design is starting to look at lot like the fictional WALL-E design (right image)!

And that's not the only linkage between WALL-E and ExoMars. In collaboration with Disney/Pixar, ESA has developed a special WALL-E website to introduce young people to the wonders of space exploration.

What is going on here?

Is ESA using WALL-E to convince European taxpayers that block-shaped industrial-looking rovers can also be cool? Is ESA now outsourcing its public outreach to Hollywood? Is ESA trying to cash in on environmental issues to sell its space missions?

Well, we don't know the answers to these questions but we thought it would be interesting to get your opinion on the relative merits of the designs with the following poll.

ESA's View on Private Suborbital Spaceflights

In our blog post Government Support for Future Lunar Missions published in July, White Label Space agreed on the necessity of governments to show interest in privately funded space projects like lunar landers.

Now, the European Space Agency has communicated it's view on space tourism, a similar topic, underlining the difficult balance of contributing to activities with available experience on the one hand, while not interfering in competitive markets on the other hand. Below, a quotation of ESA's position on space tourism.

"ESA is taking a position of cautious interest and informed support, with the following guidelines:

1. ESA should monitor the relevant technology activities and assess whether spin-ins and spin-offs could be envisaged for/from European space programmes.
2. While avoiding interfering in the development of a fully competitive market, ESA should further reflect on possible partnership with European ventures or support actions, based on mutual interest and demonstrated technical and commercial maturity, without nevertheless exposing ESA to any liabilities related to business exploitation. To this end, legal schemes should be defined to allow for such activities, as allowed within the principles laid out in the ESA Convention.
3. Provision of services by ESA in the domain of human spaceflight, in particular ‘astronaut training’, i.e. provision of expertise for developing dedicated training programmes and/or facilities for specific tourist flight opportunities, and ‘space medicine’, i.e. provision of expertise to develop dedicated medical preparation programmes of space tourists, should also be explored for mutual benefit, making available ESA’s competences under conditions to be defined.
4. ESA should contribute in the development of a regulatory frame for space tourism in Europe, involving both civil aviation regulatory authorities and competent bodies from the EC, aiming also at a ‘more level playing field’ for all parties around the world, and supporting the interests of European industry.
5. ESA should facilitate the free flow of ideas among all interested European parties, e.g. by establishing a platform for voluntary information exchange."

The full article Space Tourism as well as the complete ESA Bulletin (No. 13, August 2008) in which the article appeared can be downloaded for free from ESA's website.

European Logistics for NASA Lunar Base

NASA’s project to go back to the moon: Project Constellation, initiated in 2004 by President Bush's “Vision for Space exploration”, clearly stated exploration ambitions for the 20 upcoming years including:

• Completion of the ISS by 2010
• Retire and replace the Space Shuttle by respectively 2010 and 2014
• Perform Lunar exploration mission both robotic (from 2008) and manned (from 2020)
• Perform robotic and manned solar system exploration mission such as Mars and Near Earth Objects (NEO) such as Asteroids or Comets – (unspecified deadline)

One of the aspects less known about this law (because the “Vision for Space exploration” is actually defined under US law) is that in order to achieve those objectives, it calls for international cooperation. In this frame, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been working jointly in order to develop an International Architecture for Lunar Exploration.

It is clear that NASA, with its capabilities, will be the only contributor on several segments of such an architecture, in particular the manned transportation segments. However, as the ESA-NASA study concluded, Europe could provide a Logistic Lander based on Europe's Ariane 5 Launch Vehicle.

The latest assessment shows that if such landers are produced by ESA with a frequency of 2 per year, it would double the available time for manned lunar surface operations in the first year of the plan (in comparison with from the 5th year with the existing plans).

This video produced by NASA shows how the cooperation could look:

It seems that the ESA-NASA joint work is still on going and that NASA is now also discussing possible cooperation with other international space agencies.