Next Goals For The ESA

zeux writes "With all the news we got recently from space I tried to gather some information about the next goals of the ESA (European Space Agency). Along with a space vehicle designed to carry supplies to the ISS between 2004 and 2013, they are working on the new 'Vega' launcher (2006) and still playing with the SMART-1 probe which is slowly heading to the moon testing an ion drive that is ten times more efficient than the usual chemical systems (1500 hours cumulated thrust time so far)."

Comments

IIRC

[anzha]

The Italians had to fight tooth and nail to get the Vega launch system to be accepted by ESA for development. Part of it was, again, iirc, because it was would be separate from Arianespace. The whole point was to have an European developed follow-on for the Scout rockets that the Italians were building under license from the US.

The ATV is an excellent idea. I find it a little sad at this point that ESA hasn't successfully gone down the path of an independant manned space flight capability. Sure, they can use the Russians or the US or even the Chinese, I suppose, but it'd be interesting to see ESA come up with their own. I know they tried the Hermes space plane, but that turned out to be something of a boondoggle, didn't it?

ATV

[Aglassis]

The ATV design strikes me as particularly interesting because it brings up a point that I've been wondering for awhile: Why don't we have more automated exploration and maintenance vehicles in Earth orbit. It seems to me that a spacecraft that could launch, orbit earth, and return to earth (not that the ATV can do that) without humans onboard and built in a mass manufactured way would be extraordinarily effective for Earth orbit science experiments. It might also be useful for maintenance of high value satellites (like HST). Since Earth orbit is almost real-time transmission there is no reason to think that putting a mechanical arm on a spacecraft to do maintenance would be any different that a surgeon doing a remote operation via a mechanical hand. The most complicated part would be the approach of the satellite to be maintained, but since the Space Shuttle obviously had no problem doing this there is no reason to believe that an automated spacecraft (with real-time human backup in a controlling station) couldn't do the same (a little more complicated than the ATV's purpose of docking with the ISS, but I don't think its inanely so).