Oh the irony.

I was due to talk to the BBC this morning about the ESA Director General, Josef Aschbacher’s push for Europe to develop its own sovereign human launch system. His argument is that it is becoming increasingly important to be self-reliant for space systems (communications, remote sensing, surveillance and imaging, etc), but also for human access to space. And he has a point.

At the moment, there are five spacecraft that are capable of taking humans to low Earth orbit:

Following the retirement of the Space Shuttle, US and European astronauts relied on seats on the Soyuz to get to and from the International Space Station (ISS) for many years, until SpaceX got Crew Dragon ready for service. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, collaboration with Russia was dialled back.  There is still collaboration between the West and Russia on the ISS, it was designed that way, but plans for crews and spacecraft (including ExoMars) that had been intended to fly on the Soyuz were altered and alternative means were found.

In the near term, collaboration and launches on either Russian or Chinese spacecraft by European astronauts looks like a very remote possibility.  So what about US launchers?

The Dragon is  due to be retired in ~2030 along with the decommissioning of the Falcon 9 launcher.  Despite the phenomenal success of Falcon, SpaceX wants to devote more resource to Starship and the superheavy booster.  That removes the only currently certified US means of reaching the ISS (or any future commercial space station), both for cargo and crew.

Orion was only ever intended as a short-term spacecraft for early Artemis missions.  It is part-built in Europe with the service module produced by Airbus.

Starliner was famously not entirely successful with it’s first crewed test flight back in 2024, resulting in the crew, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, extending their stay on the ISS from ten days to nine months, becoming part of the ISS crew rotation and returning to Earth instead on the next Crew Dragon.

Boeing are still working on Starliner, and NASA recently gave them some additional funding to help.  It is due for a cargo-filled test flight to the ISS with redesigned thrusters on the service module in December/January, with the next crewed test flight scheduled for 2028.  Once Crew Dragon retires, Starliner will be the only US human launch system, assuming they can get it certified.

Aschbacher’s pitch to ESA member states is that to keep buying seats with US-based commercial suppliers would cost of the order of €5 billion over the next ten years, and that money would go abroad to help fund and develop the space sector elsewhere.  Whereas if Europe develops its own in-house human launch system, while it would cost an estimated €1 billion/year over ten years, and that money would go to European companies, stimulating our already quite spritely space sector, develop new capabilities and capacity, new supply chains, add jobs, and give us much greater resilience when it comes to launching our own astronauts and experiments into space.

Not all ESA members chose to fund the humans and robotic exploration part of the ESA budget as it is one of the optional activity programmes within the ESA budget.  The additional cost to member states of contributing to this additional €10 billion programme would bring criticism from some sectors.  When so many people are struggling to cover the basics of everyday life, there are strengthening calls to spend more of our GDP on defence, wars are ongoing, and the cost of everything is increasing, putting money towards sending a small number of people into space feels like an extravagance.

But it’s not just about putting a few people in space.  The associated technological development that is required, the expansion of the commercial space sector and the employment and productivity gains that would result, and the scientific and technological experiments that you can do in space with experienced and highly-trained humans – the argument goes that all this would benefit the economy of ESA member states in the long run.  

There are arguments both ways, of course.  But if we want reliable access to space without relying on international partners for capacity then we need our own human launch capability.  And it needs to be reusable (unlike Ariane).

But, on a day when we were meant to be having a conversation about the space sector and ESA/European capability, because of a worldwide Microsoft outage we are unable to connect!

The space sector needs redundancy. So do the rest of us.