We're a month away from a decision on a very important future space mission and I thought I'd post about it now if only to mark the calendar.

It also happens to pick up on a theme I raised in yesterday's entry about turning scientific satellites into ongoing operational programmes.

The future satellite is Jason-3.

It would be the fourth incarnation of an altimeter spacecraft that has already returned a remarkable 17-year data-set on sea-level height.

The funding situation (that is, whether there is enough) will be determined at a December council meeting of Eumetsat, the organisation that looks after Europe's meteorological satellite service.

Jason-3 is something of a test case. It will test how serious nations are about maintaining continuous, long-term, cross-calibrated data on key environmental parameters... in the midst of a credit crunch.

Everyone you speak to says this is a really important mission, but the issue as ever, is who is going to pay for it. And there is a nice little UK dimension to all of this which I'll go into shortly.

To explain Jason's significance to those not aware of the programme, it is the series of spacecraft that has detailed the recent steady rise of global waters by about 3mm per year.

Critically, because each succeeding spacecraft in the series was able to match its measurements directly against its predecessor in orbit, the data is "gold standard". It is this quality of continuity that enables scientists to discern real trends.

The story goes back to 1992 and the launch of the Topex/Poseidon mission. The data quest was then taken up by the Jason-1 satellite (launched in 2001) and by Jason-2 (launched in 2008).

Jason-1 is still working but it will fail; all satellites eventually fail. This would leave just Jason-2 in orbit. That being the case, preparation for its successor must begin soon if the space baton is not to be dropped when the digits eventually flip on Jason-2.

Knowing ocean surface elevation has many and varied applications, both short-term and long-term.

Just as surface air pressure reveals what the atmosphere is doing up above, so ocean height will betray details about the behaviour of water down below.

The data gives clues to temperature and salinity. When combined with gravity information, it will also indicate current direction and speed.

The oceans store vast amounts of heat from the Sun; and how they move that energy around the globe and interact with the atmosphere are what drive key elements of our weather and the climate system.

Put simply, to understand climate you have to understand the oceans, and one of the best ways to understand the oceans globally is to measure surface elevation.

All good stuff, but back to the Jason-3 budget.

In the past, Jason has been led by the US and France. That will continue to be the case.

Its importance though to meteorologists has meant that Eumetsat has become involved in a big way; as has the EU because of its Earth monitoring project called GMES.

The total cost of the mission is of the order of 252m euros, of which Europe will cover about 146m. (One of the big contributions from the US will be the provision of a launcher.)

The numbers then stack up like this: the European Commission will provide 26m, the European Space Agency will put in 7m; and the French, as one of the senior partners, will sign off almost 49m. The French, for example, will build the satellite platform.

That leaves just over 63m from Eumetsat. The organisation is looking for a commitment in December of 90% of that figure to get the Jason-3 project up and running.

Now, here's the point of all this. Jason-3 is not a mandatory programme within Eumetsat; it is an optional programme. If a member state decides it likes the project, it "chooses" to subscribe.

Usually, although not always, the subscription is made at the comparative Gross National Income (GNI) level of the member state within Eumetsat.

For the UK, for example, the GNI Eumetsat figure is 16.173%. It is a large figure because Britain is one of the richest nations in Europe.

You can see straightaway, therefore, that if the Jason-3 programme is going to clear the 90% bar in December, the decision the London government makes on funding could be critical.

I mentioned Jason-3 to the British science minister Lord Drayson when I saw him a couple of weeks ago in the Palace of Westminster and he confirmed that discussions within government were ongoing.

It would be wrong to suggest that Jason-3 hangs on the British. Other Eumetsat delegations will play their part.

What it does emphasise, however, is the need to find ways of funding ongoing flagship programmes like Jason that don't involve protracted re-negotiation every five years.

Watch this space.

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Europe's water mission, Smos, is a really big deal for Spain.

The satellite, sent into orbit from Plesetsk in northern Russia in the early hours of Monday, marked something of a coming of age.

Spain has been increasing its contribution to the European Space Agency for a number of years now, and is currently the fifth largest member financially - behind Germany, France, Italy and the UK.

The programme cost of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (Smos) satellite is in the region of 315m euros. France, one of the great power-houses of European space, has put more than 100m euros into the mission, but Spain is also sitting in the front seat having contributed 70m euros.

Spanish engineers have spent something like 15 years developing the spacecraft's novel instrument - Miras.

Jorge Lomba is from the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) in Madrid. He told me just how important Smos was to his country:

"We have launched national missions but for something which is a contribution to European programmes, this is by far the largest. Because this is quite complete in the sense that we have leadership in the instrument, industrial leadership in the scientific centres in Spain, and leadership in one of the two principal investigators in Jordi Font."

You can think of the CDTI as the Spanish space office. It's a small group of civil servants who manage Spanish space activity. Spain is very similar in that sense to the UK in that neither country has a space agency.

Jean-Jacques Dordain, the director-general of Esa, was very quick to praise Spain after Monday's successful launch.

"With Smos, Spanish industry has made a breakthrough from being an equipment supplier to a system provider with a very complex instrument."

Miras has a "Y" configuration that gives the spacecraft a very interesting shape. I've compared it to a "space helicopter", although I should stress that it is nothing of the sort and the rotor-like arms of Miras do not turn.

From a certain angle (look at the artist's impression on this page), Smos is also reminiscent of one of the vehicles in the Star Wars movies. I'm sure those who know their X-wings from their Millennium Falcons will be able to tell me which one.

It seems to be a feature of the European Space Agency's Earth Explorer series of satellites that they're all visually striking.

Miras should gather some remarkable new data on the wetness of soils and the saltiness of the oceans.

These features tell scientists about the constant exchange of water between the planet's surface and the atmosphere. The data should improve weather forecasts made several weeks ahead.

Understanding the salinity of sea-water gives climatologists clues about global ocean currents. It is the mass movement of water between the world's ocean basins that helps drive the climate system.

Of course, for Spain, what it would dearly like now is for Smos - or at least its instrument - to become recurrent mission, and even now it is working hard to improve the capabilities of a future Miras.

It's a tough one, though. Esa makes scientific satellites. Once it's done something, it tends not to re-visit it.

Earth observation instruments with pressing ongoing value are expected to be taken up by Eumetsat, the European meteorological satellite service. But it is about to start big programmes (jointly with Esa) to upgrade its existing weather satellites.

The third generation of the Meteosat series and future Metop spacecraft will cost billions. It is unclear at the moment where the Spanish Smos expertise and excellence developed over the past 15 years could be picked up.

But this is a perennial problem for Europe - turning high-value scientific satellites into ongoing operational programmes. And in the midst of a credit crunch, the problem is doubly difficult.

Watch this space.

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The "stick" has flown. The 100m-tall, super-slim Ares 1-X rocket has completed its demonstration mission.

Time will now tell whether this event was a giant leap on the road to a new astronaut launch system or just a spectacular side-show.

Nasa wants to use the fully developed Ares 1 to propel its next-generation crewship into orbit, and expects the rocket to be flying in 2015.

A White House advisory panel has suggested otherwise [PDF 7Mb]. It doubts Ares can be made to fly before 2017, and has pointed to potentially easier and cheaper options for getting humans into low-Earth orbit.

Wednesday's launch may not have advanced Ares' cause, but it will not have harmed it either.

The flight went ahead after a series of frustrating "no go" calls from weather officers.

Conditions had seemed benign enough except for some persistent high cloud.

The concern was that if the vehicle had climbed through this cloud, a build-up of static might have interfered with radio signals sent to and from the rocket.

If the flight had gone wrong for some reason and the vehicle had begun to veer out of control, this "triboelectric effect" could have interfered with a command to destroy the rocket.

The risks associated with a maiden flight are always higher than with a proven vehicle and so nothing could be left to chance.

The 1-X had an explosive charge running the full length of the booster and officials at the spaceport would not have hesitated in using it if required to do so.

As we now know, the weather finally obliged towards the end of the launch window and the Ares 1-X was given a "go" for 1530 GMT.

The 1-X uses the same booster technology (with modifications) that helps lift the space shuttle off the launch pad. The higher thrust-to-weight ratio of the slender 1-X meant of course that its departure from terra firma had a little more zip about it.

Everything appeared to go pretty much to plan: a two-minute powered flight to more than 130,000ft (45km), with the vehicle moving at almost five times the speed of sound.

Separation of the booster from the upper part of the rocket occurred right on cue.

The booster was flipped by thrusters to slow it, and it fell towards the ocean, deploying a new parachute system during the descent.

The team sent to recover the booster from the water also tried out a method of retrieval not previously used to salvage the shuttle's discarded motors.

One point of note was the way the upper part of the 1-X - a physical simulation of what the top of an Ares 1 should look like - appeared to start its tumble motion earlier than expected.

All of the immediate goals do seem to have been achieved. But it will take months for engineers to assess the data returned by the more-than-700 sensors on the 1-X.

The demonstrator was intended to help verify design assumptions so that when the Ares 1 proper is built, everyone can be confident it will fly as expected.

Which brings us back to the "big question": will the Ares 1 actually be developed?

This is one only President Barack Obama can answer. He also has to find a budget to support whatever solution he proposes to get US astronauts into space once the shuttle is retired.

His expert panel has told him that $3bn a year extra is needed by Nasa to do anything "meaningful" in the realm of human spaceflight.

The weeks ahead in Washington are sure to be fascinating. The lobbying will be intense, and Congress is sure to want to have a say.

I know science reporters like myself are usually given the "space beat" in the mainstream media, but I'm very aware that the decision which has to be taken is not a scientific one. It's a political one; and given the size of the US space sector, it has major economic considerations.

Many thousands of jobs will hang on President Obama's Ares deliberations.

Watch this space.

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