Josef Aschbacher says first infrastructure will be in place within a decade, despite current problems
Europe will have a base on the moon in the future, with the first infrastructure being in place within a decade, according to the head of the European Space Agency.
“It will happen,” Esa director general Josef Aschbacher told the European Parliament research committee last week, responding to a question about whether there will be a European moon base.
His certainty about the moon base was in contrast to much of his update on Esa activities to the committee, in which he stressed that Europe still needs to decide how much funding it wants to commit to space.
“It will take a bit of time until the infrastructure and facilities will be built up, but in the next decade you will be sure there will be first developments of houses, infrastructure—whether these then develop into villages or towns or individual stations, we do not know yet,” Aschbacher said of the moon base.
He added that there are “a lot” of companies in Europe and elsewhere that see the moon as having “huge” potential for obtaining resources such as minerals and metals that are rare on Earth.
More funding needed
But Esa needs more funding if Europe is to pursue space exploration, Aschbacher said.
The agency has a 2023 budget of about €7 billion, and Aschbacher said that with “a significant fraction” more it “could engage very significantly in exploration”, to the extent that it could eventually land astronauts on the moon.
But he said Europe currently does not have the technology for this, and that it would only be achievable between 2030, when China wants to put people on the moon, and 2040, when India does, and also only “if we put the energy together, if we have the funding and a clear mandate”.
Aschbacher said that Europe “should not miss the train”, pointing out that the US space agency Nasa has a budget about four times the size of Esa’s, or six times if the defence activities of the US are included.
“If we don’t do it, then exactly the same will happen as happened in chips, IT or other domains where Europe [has] not invested” and so missed out on economic opportunities, he said.
“This is really a discussion of a political nature.”
Access problems
At present, Europe is struggling even to achieve autonomous access to space, relying on the US to launch satellites while it tests a new generation of its own launchers.
Aschbacher said it was “a big problem for us all in Europe” that the new Ariane 6 launcher is not yet ready, adding that Esa is doing “everything we can” to get it ready “as quickly as possible”.
“I personally have done a very serious analysis of the lessons learned, why we are in this situation, what we need to do in the future,” he said. “A lot of this is being debated right now among decision-makers…We are in the midst of what I’d almost call a paradigm shift…where the new generation of launchers are probably done in a very different way.”
Aschbacher said he expected “very important messages” to emerge on European launcher strategy at a space summit taking place in Spain on 6 November.