“The goal is for Europeans to step on the moon.” ESA will negotiate its participation in the Artemis missions
The European Space Agency (ESA) will “negotiate” its participation in future Artemis lunar missions after NASA has thoroughly reviewed the architecture of its program, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in an interview with AFP.
On the night of Wednesday to Thursday, a historic moment took place: the Artemis II mission was successfully launched and astronauts will approach the Moon for the first time in 54 years
NASA announced a little more than a week ago that it was suspending the project to build a space station around the moon, called Gateway, to focus on building a base on lunar soil.
For the European space sector, this change in direction raises the question of what will happen to the agreements reached with NASA under the Gateway project, which provided for the sending of three European astronauts on the Artemis missions.
A German was to fly first. A Frenchman, who might be Thomas Pesquet, and an Italian Trar should have followed.
What does Europe have to bring to this negotiation?
“We had an agreement with NASA for three seats on flights to Gateway. The Gateway project is suspended, so I will have to meet with the administrator, Jared Isaacman, and NASA to negotiate how these seats that had been allocated for Gateway can be used for the (solar) surface,” said Josef Aschbacher, who came to the Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch of the four American and Canadian astronauts of the Artemis 2 mission, which will orbit around Mondays for the next nine days.
“How many seats in flights to the surface, under what conditions, what counterpart must Europe bring to this negotiation and this discussion?”, he listed.
“It's a discussion that needs to happen right now. We need to really get down to the nitty-gritty to get all of these issues resolved,” he insisted.
At first, Europe needs to work with the US
“The goal is for Europeans to walk on the moon,” insisted the Austrian official.
“It's clear that initially we need to work with the United States to make this possible. But of course the dream, or the goal, is that, in the long term, Europe will develop its own technologies and skills to be more autonomous in manned spaceflight,” he stated ambitiously.
Europe was to supply some of the Gateway components already built or under development – as was the Japanese space agency (JAXA), another NASA partner, with a Japanese astronaut set to travel before the first European.
