Are we pilots or are we passengers? Aschbacher asks:
European Space Agency (ESA) Director General Josef Aschbacher has taken a swipe at NASA and US policy, while calling for autonomy in human spaceflight via an opinion post titled "Are we pilots or are we passengers?"
The May 18 post is emblematic of the hand-wringing within ESA over the last few years as NASA has lurched from plan to plan amid fluctuating priorities and funding. Aschbacher, it appears, has had enough.
"Europe has become too exposed to decisions beyond its control," he said.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman recently announced changes that would pause, and likely cancel, the Lunar Gateway space station project in favor of a Moon base. The decision, along with scrapping the over-budget and delayed Mars Sample Return mission, does not sit well with ESA, which had a hand in both.
Aschbacher warned of the potential for dependence on third parties for programs including human spaceflight. ESA removed reliance on Russia for missions such as ExoMars, and turbulence in US space policy has given the agency pause for thought.
"Europe must decide whether it prefers to be dependent on others to send its explorers into space or to assume its role as a fully capable space power. As the head of the European Space Agency (ESA), I am convinced that autonomous human spaceflight is not a luxury. It is a necessary anchor for Europe to secure its freedom to unlock the scientific, economic, strategic and geopolitical benefits of space and to inspire a new generation to shape Europe's future."
In 2025, an agency insider referred to NASA as "an abusive spouse who could lash out at any moment in unpredictable ways." In 2026, Aschbacher's patience appears to be running out.
"I'm glad," a source told The Register. "The US has fucked us around for too long."
Aschbacher and ESA would not put it so bluntly. However, one of ESA's strengths is also one of its weaknesses. The agency has 23 member states. Political and funding decisions are imminent: the ESA Council meets in June, the Intermediate Ministerial Council is in December, and a full Council at Ministerial level is due in 2028.
"If we started today," Aschbacher wrote, "it would still take us many years to build autonomous capability – we must act quickly. The cost of inaction would far outweigh the necessary investment."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29, @04:08AM (1 child)
> "Are we pilots or are we passengers?"
Isn't this the question brought up by the early Mercury Seven astronauts...as documented in "The Right Stuff" (the book)? They were test pilots with well practiced aircraft control skill, and the Mercury spacecraft was (for the time) highly automated, so the pilots had very little control.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday May 29, @09:26AM
I think this is more metaphorical: pilots in the sense of steering their own space programme, rather than forming collaborations with others.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Troll) by edinlinux on Friday May 29, @09:09AM (23 children)
If ESA doesn't like being dragged around by NASA, then they should properly fund and run their own space program.
But that costs money..
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Friday May 29, @09:18AM (22 children)
They do.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Unixnut on Friday May 29, @09:38AM (5 children)
If they did they would not be complaining right now would they?
Not that I would object to the ESA increasing their funding to the point where they can be completely independent of the USA, it would be one of the better things the EU could throw money at as far as I am concerned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Friday May 29, @09:43AM (4 children)
If they did they would not be complaining right now would they?
That's not what they're complaining about, though, is it? They were led to believe they'd have important roles in significant missions and have been messed about (due to MAGA politics mostly).
Not that I would object to the ESA increasing their funding to the point where they can be completely independent of the USA, it would be one of the better things the EU could throw money at as far as I am concerned.
ESA is not the EU. Canada and the UK are members of ESA.
I think that ESA should be more ambitious and better funded. Russia, the USA and China are clearly all doing their own things, so Europe should too. It was naive to assume that we'd always be "friends" with the USA, apparently.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 29, @12:38PM (1 child)
Yeah, MAGA politics.
We need answers to such stupidities. Space exploration is great, but after a decade of tRump and MAGA, I consider the threat from the far-right our #1 problem, bigger than Climate Change. One answer from the space exploration angle is to colonize Mars. The idea of course is that if far-right or any other idiots start a nuclear war on Earth, humanity can recover from that disaster by sheltering on Mars for the many centuries it would take to restore Earth. Problem with that is, colonizing Mars is far harder to realize than most people appreciate. Maybe we have too much SF that makes too light of the difficulties. Colonizing Mars is so hard that it may not be possible at all. Everywhere else in the solar system is worse than Mars. And as for the notion of colonizing other solar systems, the distance and travel time is extremely extremely prohibitive. Space exploration has at the least done that: showed what an extremely hostile place the universe is.
It's remarkable how similar far-right movements around the world are. That at least means that ways to end the threat they pose will be applicable throughout the entire world. What works? Education? Yes, somewhat. Many have talked of Asperger's as a "syndrome" and "disorder", as if it's a medical condition. Autism, yes, that can be considered a disorder. I think authoritarianism a far worse disorder, though it is not commonly talked of as if it is a disorder. Could some sort of medical treatment for authoritarianism be developed? Or maybe the problem it poses could be addressed socially, perhaps a criminal justice approach in which the law comes down hard on bullying, prejudice, and discrimination? One hope I have is the long game, in which evolutionary pressures cause authoritarianism to evolve out of the population. Would take centuries, millennia, maybe even longer. This presumes that an authoritarian mindset makes a person less evolutionarily fit.
In the meantime, which way should ESA go? Which way is the best for answering the threats posed by the far-right? Continuing to cooperate, wouldn't that be best?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31, @12:31AM
Hmm, probably have to kill all the men... The roots of fascism sprout in the authoritarian home. So we definitely have to begin at the beginning.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday May 29, @01:11PM
ESA is a political quagmire. I am not in favor or throwing more money at an institution with proven inefficiencies. ESA has failed to improve its launch capabilities and is relying on SpaceX at least for some missions. Satellites cannot be launched cost competitively by ESA which calls for fixing that problem first within the available budget. AFAIK ESA did have a recent budget raise due to MAGA.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FunkyLich on Friday May 29, @03:48PM
I see there mentioned " ESA removed reliance on Russia for missions such as ExoMars", but for what it's worth, the Russian space programmes have a history of reliable partners even if the politics were not too warm. For a long time they were the only way to go to the ISS and also all of the propulsion systems of the ISS to this day, are Russian boosters. Like it or not, they have proven more reliable and long lasting. They never gave the trumpistic nagging of threateing to not go on with ferrying american astronauts and american equipment to and fro. Despite all the 'but but they have inferior tech' baby cries. There is a reason why the meme "The Russians punch holes in the clouds with rockets" exists: while a Space Shuttle launch would get canceled because of a drop in temperature of 2-4 Celsius compared to the predicted for that day, the Energia rockets would launch on rainy and windy days and didn't care, and that is a fact. In the history of humankind of the last 100 years, Americans have top spot for betraying their partners in most things: trade, space, telecoms (Hello Snowden), and so on.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Friday May 29, @10:34AM (15 children)
I don't want to say who is right, but:
NASA budget 24,438 BN dollars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [wikipedia.org]
ESA budget 8,300 BN Euros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday May 29, @10:40AM
Worth also saying that ESA members may maintain their own national budgets e.g. UK has a 600 M£ budget, etc. There are also defence budgets (US and European), etc.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday May 29, @12:15PM (11 children)
The NASA budget 24.4 G dollars vs the ESA budget of 8.3 G euros is comparing apples and oranges. The ESA has been public, though since a couple of years ago that might be changing. NASA has been privatized in that it outsources to political cronies and campaign donors of questionable ability [theguardian.com] to deliver poor results [independent.co.uk] quite expensively [cagw.org]. Even if it were just a matter of profit, the project still has to pay for the work to get done plus pay for an extra layer of management and then profit, too. Thus the 2.4 G dollar budget might end up being more comparable to the 8.3 G euro budget once profits, cost overruns, and general corporate inefficiency are factored in. Public sector activities are no model of efficiency and low cost, but compared to the bureaucracy which the private sector demonstrates, it's proven over time to be more likely to get the job done at least in the space domain.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Friday May 29, @12:50PM (2 children)
I get it, I'm just skeptical - I think public organisations are just as capable of squandering money as private organisations.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday May 29, @03:23PM (1 child)
I get it, I'm just skeptical - I think public organisations are just as capable of squandering money as private organisations.
Take the basic level of money squandering and then add 40% to it for a layer of profit. Or cut back on the core a bit to give the illusion that the 40% skimmed off the top is smaller than it really is.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 29, @11:01PM
I think you underestimate how badly public institutions squander money, especially organizations like NASA which have no serious deliverables. At least the US Post Office has to deliver mail; Amtrak has to run trains; and the IRS has to collect revenue. They fail to do this and it gets noticed. NASA has failed to build a new orbital launch platform since it developed the Space Shuttle in 1970s. That's half a century of spending a vast amount of money doing nothing. The only businesses that can do that, are the ones being paid by some government to do nothing.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Friday May 29, @02:47PM (6 children)
Who again has launched half [soylentnews.org] of the orbital flights in 2025? In that linked thread you were complaining about "clowns" who were better at blowing up rockets than launching them. I noted in the above linked response that SpaceX's Falcon 9 platform was responsible for half of all orbital launches (165 launches out of 330) and zero of the 17 launch failures that happened that year. I grant that NASA is a failure much like the ESA or China's space program, but it's not because they privatized too much.
And I think it's telling that you completely miss the poster child for NASA's failures in this area - the Space Launch System. The money spent on that is at least an order of magnitude more than they've spent on Blue Origin and SpaceX combined. Think about it. Sure, there might be too much earth-shattering kaboom in these private-side endeavors, but at least they're doing something with that money. The SLS will make its second launch attempt ever in mid-2027. Maybe. That's the real difference between a NASA space launch program and a real one.
My view is that moving the orbital launch market completely to the private side is where NASA should have gone with this in 1975. We have so much lost future because we went the government-dominated route for thirty years. It would have been even longer, if the US Department of Defense hadn't intervened with its own launch initiative in the mid-1990s that encouraged SpaceX to start.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday May 29, @03:32PM (4 children)
The Space Launch System was Boeing. And, as you point out, it failed. Boeing left aerospace a long time before that, and it shows. They can't even make workable airplanes any more, though their capitalization methods do produce a large to be able to afford enough lawyers to avoid criminal penalties in that area.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Friday May 29, @10:46PM (3 children)
SLS is just as privatized as every NASA launch system that came before!
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Saturday May 30, @09:23AM (2 children)
SLS lives off government handouts, so does SpaceX. Where is the difference?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 30, @11:52PM (1 child)
First, SpaceX lives far more off its Starlink sales - crudely two thirds of its launches were to put Starlink satellites in orbit. Even when it launches a government payload (and it has plenty of commercial (that is, non-government) launches, the payload is often by a government other than the US. Meanwhile SLS is a pure government play. Its sole funding source is NASA. This difference leads to other differences. For example, SLS has strong incentive to cost overspend and fall just short of success - to encourage the funding source to spend more. Meanwhile SpaceX is paid for completed launches or for Starlink services. If they don't succeed, SpaceX might get some money, but it won't get the full payment. So there is a strong incentive to provide good launch services at a reasonable price.
In other words, SpaceX lives off more than government handouts. Those other revenue sources force it to deliver real world services at a reasonable price and simultaneously supply non-NASA funding. SLS doesn't have any such incentive. That's why SLS has made one token launch in the past 15 years while spending around ~$100 billion while SpaceX has launched over 600 times for vastly lower cost to the US federal government.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 30, @11:56PM
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday May 30, @08:56AM
Totally agree that SpaceX (private) is very successful - to the point that they have completely changed the launch market. ArianeSpace (public) was/is also very successful, so score one in that direction. Soyuz was also pretty successful. Recently the "too big to fail" model of the big rocket vendors has broken, maybe that's thanks to NASA (I don't know). I remember in the ?00s? there were a whole load of contenders for reusable launch, probably following on from the shuttle programme (retirement announced 2004). SpaceX succeeded, where others (Skylon, Virgin, etc) failed. That's a place where privatisation arguably wins over public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31, @01:00AM
Saturn V launch vehicle:
All engines were built by Rocketdyne. Boeing built the kerolox S-IC first stage powered by five F-1 engines; these remain the most powerful single chamber liquid-fuelled engines ever built. North American Aviation the hydrolox S-II second stage, and Douglas Aircraft Company the hydrolox S-IVB third stage, powered by five and one J-2 engines respectively. IBM and MSFC designed the rocket's instrument unit.
The design bureau was privatized, but fabrication was always "private"
Any and all problems we have with the government are rooted in lack of public participation and oversight. It's up to us to hire better managers.
And furthermore, neither Musk or Bezos are the first [youtube.com]
And furthermore, cronyism? Please, it's no worse than it always was. They just pulled the curtain.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday May 29, @12:53PM
Thanks whoever modded as troll. Presumably facts are trolling when they don't promote the correct narrative?? Or you question the source, which I cited, but are too cowardly to propose a better one?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Friday May 29, @05:21PM
The actual situation is far worse, EU spending roughly funnels it all thru ESA and I've seen numbers that are more like $6B (it varies a lot)
In the USA NASA only covers strictly civilian spending even on "shared missions" and such and ignores commercial also. So total USA aerospace spending is over $60B because only about a third of spending flows thru NASA.
Its like in euro-istan if you're a grad student doing an aerospace phd thats probably ESA funded, but in the usa your PHD is probably funded via alternative paths, defense dept research contracts etc.
The ratio is more like 10 to 1, honestly... probably higher.
Its like a kid and a parent arguing over who owns the car, when the parent paid for the whole thing. Its rather cute the .eu thinks they have an aerospace program of their own, like a little kid pretending to be their parent.
"Are we pilots or are we passengers?"
They're passengers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29, @08:50PM
They are swimming in a morass of bureaucracy. They can't do anything "quickly".