Provocarea actuală a Europei: obținerea propriului lansator de rachete reutilizabile
Directorul Agenției Spațiale Europene, Josef Aschbacher, a declarat într-un interviu că Europa trebuie să obțină rapid propriul lansator de rachete reutilizabile pentru a ajunge din urmă SpaceX, compania dominantă a miliardarului Elon Musk.
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The European Space Agency has already announced a shortlist of five European aerospace companies bidding to build the continent's first reusable rocket launch system.
"We have to really catch up and make sure that we come to the market with a reusable launcher relatively fast," Aschbacher said in Paris.
"We are on the right path" to getting this done, he added.
"Ariane 6 is an excellent rocket -- it's very precise," Aschbacher said. But the system is not reusable, unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9 workhorse.
When Ariane 6 was being planned more than a decade ago, reusability was not considered worth the extra cost and time.
But it has come under criticism when compared to the relatively cheap, reusable Falcon 9, which has completed well over 100 launches this year alone.
A European Starlink?
Many of the Falcon 9 flights have carried the more than 8,000 satellites that make up Musk's Starlink internet network into space.
The European Union is planning to create its own internet satellite constellation called IRIS2, scheduled to become operational in 2030.
"Europe needs it absolutely urgently," Aschbacher said. "We have to make sure that we have the rockets to bring our satellites to space."
He stressed that IRIS2 would be "very different" from Starlink, with fewer satellites, while focusing more on "secure communication".
The constellation will mark a technological leap forward, even though Europe sometimes lags "a few years behind" its competitors, Aschbacher said.
Aschbacher noted that the EU'S navigation satellite system Galileo and Earth observation programme Copernicus started out 10 to 15 years behind US competitors GPS and Landsat.
Now both EU programmes are "the best in the world", he said.
Aschbacher lamented that European public investment in space is declining, even as the global space economy grows. He called for "very strong financial engagement" from the ESA's 23 member states, which includes the United Kingdom, at November's ministerial council in the German city of Bremen in November.