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Europe and China Will Team Up For a Robotic Space Mission
Taco Cowboy writes with this excerpt from Space.com: On Monday (Jan. 19), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) issued a call for proposals for a robotic space mission that the two organizations will develop jointly. "The goal of the present Call is to define a scientific space mission to be implemented by ESA and CAS as a cooperative endeavor between the European and Chinese scientific communities," ESA officials wrote in a statement Monday. "The mission selected as an outcome of the present Joint Call will follow a collaborative approach through all the phases: study, definition, implementation, operations and scientific exploitation." The call envisions a low-budget mission, saying that ESA and CAS are each prepared to contribute about 53 million euros (U.S. $61.5 million at current exchange rates). The spacecraft must weigh less than 661 lbs. (300 kilograms) at launch and be designed to operate for at least two to three years, ESA officials wrote in the call for proposals. All proposals are due by March 16, and the peer-review process will start in April. Mission selection is expected to occur in late 2015, followed by six years of development, with a launch in 2021.
That's the goal of the call for proposal. Something like "Dear scientist, we have a budget of 300kg and 50 millions euros (out of which x% must be kept for the platform). What do you want to do?"
Yes of course valuable ESA technologies, because USA isn't producing anything of value.
Pretty sure NASA has been relegated to the status of "service provider" for SpaceX.
Uh. Just ask around how happy people were when Italy designed the VEGA rocket. A solid rocket launcher which can launch satellites to orbit. That's basically military grade technology. The Italians had an ambition to have their own SLBMs in the 1970s called Alfa. Now I am not saying they will use the technology for nukes but if they want to do them in the future the technology will be there.
On a robotic space mission propulsion technology is less likely to be exchanged. But things like autonomous flight software and precision flight which would be quite adaptable to drone technology may end up being exchanged.
Then again the Chinese are almost as advanced as the EU in drone technology now so it probably doesn't matter.