The European Space Agency wants to bring a new cargo vehicle to the ISS space station by 2028 – and generally “a new risk culture”. The first five images from the new “Euclid” mission are here.
The European space agency ESA wants to advance Europe in space with more competition. At the two-day space summit in Seville, ESA ministers advanced two corresponding projects. The agency wants to develop a European spacecraft by 2028 that can bring cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) and back to Earth. The vehicle will be created through competition between European companies.
ESA chief Josef Aschbacher spoke on Tuesday about a paradigm shift. ESA also wants to launch a competition for new launch vehicles. “We decided to completely change the way the next launch vehicle is defined,” said Aschbacher. The industry will make proposals and ESA will be a client.
The European Commission supports space plans
The course was supported by EU Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton. “The commercialization of space activities is a priority,” said Breton. The sector is increasingly competitive, especially from non-European players. “We have to change our approach towards a new risk culture.” At the summit, Aschbacher emphasized that we had to change the way rockets were acquired and that we wanted to interact more dynamically and quickly with the industry in the future.
The development of a cargo vehicle is important to ESA for two reasons. On the one hand, Aschbacher sees an opportunity for Europe to offer commercial suppliers the transport of goods in the future. This could result in future commercial space stations being used and astronauts flying there in return.
Preparatory work for manned space travel
Furthermore, the vehicle could later be developed for human space travel and could also fly to other destinations if countries wanted, ESA said. Autonomous access to space is an important topic for ESA. There is a European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, and ESA can launch satellites into space using European launchers. However, there is no European spacecraft for manned flights.
Another central theme of the summit was climate protection and sustainability. ESA aims to work more closely with the EU in the fight against climate change and look at how data from space can be used more intensively.
ESA also wants to make space travel itself more sustainable. By 2030, it aims to drastically limit the creation of space debris in Earth and Moon orbits during future missions. ESA called on other space actors to adhere to a charter published at the summit that aims to lead to the complete elimination of debris in space (Zero Debris Charter).
Five new images from the “Euclid” mission
At the end of the space summit, ESA also presented the first five images from its new “Euclid” mission to investigate dark matter and dark energy. “Never before has a telescope been able to capture such sharp astronomical images over such a large part of the sky and look so far into the distant universe,” the agency said.
The “Euclides” probe was launched into space in early July. Your telescope will help, among other things, to deduce the shape, position and movement of galaxies. In total, data will be collected on billions of galaxies. ESA wants to look into the past of the universe and investigate its development over the last ten billion years. This could provide information about how matter is distributed in space and how the expansion of the universe has developed throughout cosmic history. From this, astronomers hope to learn more about dark matter and dark energy. (APA)