ESA toasts 10% budget boost by stretching ISS support out to 2030 ESA bigwigs were cock-a-hoop today as the agency's Ministerial Council passed a bonzer budget, with the UK, Germany, Italy and France splashing the most cash. The 10 per cent rise was, according to ESA, the first significant boost in funding in 25 years. Total subscriptions (PDF) from the states stood at €14.4bn, with Germany …
> Unlike NASA, which operates on a year-to-year basis (albeit with a much bigger budget), ESA's budget gives the agency five years, which makes planning a tad easier.
That's a corker. NASA has been not-so-royally f*cked by the space mission du jour "planning" where we just do robotics go to the Moon Mars Lunar Gateway Moon is it still the Moon?
The president tells NASA to do something, mainly for a sound bite, NASA dutifully spends a couple hundred million planning, then get told to trash all that and do something else.
So our future in space comes down to wacknuts like Musk and Bezos spending their personal fortunes. Then some fruitcake goes "but that needs to be spent here on Earth for the poor!"
"Then some fruitcake goes "but that needs to be spent here on Earth for the poor!""
I wouldn't call the idea of billionaires having to pay taxes and not spunk their money on vanity projects 'fruitcake'. You might not agree, but which one of the two -- Muck or such people -- put a car in space?
'So our future in space comes down to wacknuts like Musk and Bezos spending their personal fortunes. Then some fruitcake goes "but that needs to be spent here on Earth for the poor!" '
Do you have citations for what makes those moderately successful and wealthy individuals 'wacknuts'? And which 'fruitcake' actually intends to redistribute those particular "personal fortunes" on the poor? If you believe it's any politician or controller of a current financial system you are clearly deluded. No such over-hyped redistribution of wealth has happened since that bloke was having an picnic on a mountainside and handed out a few spare sardine sandwiches ...
I see nothing moderate in either of those billionaires, or in any billionaire actually. You've got quite some cheek to suggest that they are "moderately" wealthy. Either that or you should get back in touch with reality.
The only thing I see in favor of these two is that they are doing what NASA cannot do any more : getting Humanity back into space. I'm willing to forgive them their excesses for that reason.
...some contractors in key congressional districts get to pocket most of that money...
Saying something is working "as it's supposed to" is not the same thing as "as intended". The system may be working the way the people who designed it intended, but that is definitely not the way it is supposed to be.
Granted, Musk and Bezos and the rest of that lot belong to a particular species of eccentrics. But for good reason: to achieve what they have, you have to be!
Musk especially is a good example. SpaceX has achieved things in 17 years that NASA (and Boing!) are still not capable of, in spite of having been in the game for more than half a century and having been allocated budgets with many more zeroes than what SpaceX has to play with.
You can't do all that unless you have an ego the size of Jupiter.
So yes, he's a little weird. But he's been successful because of it, not in spite of it.
Musk especially is a good example. SpaceX has achieved things in 17 years that NASA (and Boing!) are still not capable of, in spite of having been in the game for more than half a century and having been allocated budgets with many more zeroes than what SpaceX has to play with.
I'm something of a Musk fanboy, but I'm not sure its a fair comparison with NASA. Musk has a laser like focus where he's answerable to nobody. NASA is answerable to whoever is in the White house, whatever committee makes up their budget, and a whole host of political considerations (the environmental friendliness of their existence etc) that Musk can simply ignore if he chooses.
You can't compare committee's to individuals, which is why they only build statues of the latter.
"The ESA, just like the EU, is doomed to ultimate catastrophic failure." @beast666
Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion, or is it kneejerk "Europe baaaaaaad!" commentary? Or perhaps you think all space agencies around the world are necessarily "doomed"? (If so, I suspect India and China would like a word, not to mention the USA)
"Some within ESA had expressed a little disquiet about the latter in conversation with El Reg recently, wishing that perhaps the agency could have been a little braver and pushed ahead with more exotic tech while leaving traditional rocketry with the commercial launch providers."
I have to presume the "little disquieted" were British and I will have to presume that if Britain happened to have any sort of launch providers they would eagerly support them or, are we confronted with the mindset that destroyed large parts of British industry like the car manufacturing that went from number two to number thirteen in the world.
On Ariane:
"The European Space Agency (ESA) charged the EADS subsidiary Astrium, presently Airbus Defence and Space, with the development of all Ariane launchers and of the testing facilities, while Arianespace, a 32.5% CNES (French government space agency) commercial subsidiary created in 1980, handles production, operations and marketing. Arianespace launches Ariane rockets from the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou in French Guiana".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_(rocket_family)
And on ESA and the EU:
"The political perspective of the European Union (EU) was to make ESA an agency of the EU by 2014,[79] although this date was not met. The EU is already the largest single donor to ESA's budget and non-ESA EU states are observers at ESA.....
ESA is funded from annual contributions by national governments as well as from an annual contribution by the European Union (EU)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency
Better keep the control where the money is.
Most member states of ESA (which are not the same as the EU) have some kind of domestic space agency which, depending on the country, develops its own programmes, channels funding to ESA and coordinates their national research (inside or outside of ESA programmes).
The UK has the UKSA (UK Space Agency) which appears to have developed some way from its predecessor (the BNSC) to both investing heavily in ESA and doing independent research and development with domestic research and industrial groups.
https://www.gov.uk/ukspaceagency
As the original article says - the UK have definitely not gone away from ESA. Actually the opposite has happened and the UK is increasing its involvement in the Agency.
One point to bear in mind is ESA has a system of geographical return (you put 10 quid into the Agency and you get 10 quid back in the form of contracts). This is very different to the EU/EC approach which is just the best bid (which hurts small countries).
As to Skylon - you should be aware that the development of the SABRE engine (which is the heart of Skylon) is being funded partially by ESA.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/Air-breathing_engine_precooler_achieves_record-breaking_Mach_5_performance
I dont think Skylon will every fly.
The UK is often able to 'punch above its weight' - in design and prototyping for advanced designs and innovative tech.
The UK too small to properly capitalise it as a whole project. Like the design of the Jet engine in commercial flight - ultimately, Boeing won over the comet - a plane years ahead of its time, using new all metal skin technologies- which was flawed because we didnt know of metal fatigue. It was only later with Nimrod (basically the same plane that was used for 60 years) that the UK (and the world) fully got the tech understood.
Rolls Royce is a design success story in Jet engine design. They successfully build one part of a project.
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