'You have the bridge, Mr De Winne'
It's the hot topic of the moment and so it's natural that any conversation is going to start with the new UK Space Agency (UKSA).
Belgian Frank De Winne, the first European to command the International Space Station, is inspecting the new agency's logo...and the name:
"So, how do you say it? 'Yuke-sar'?"
I don't think anyone is quite sure. Everyone is still just enjoying the moment.
Frank has an interesting British connection. He spent a year at MoD Boscombe Down, in Wiltshire, in the early '90s. It was at the former RAF station there that he passed the exams needed to become a test pilot.
His fellow pupil on the course was Thomas Reiter, who would eventually become the first European astronaut to be sent on a long-duration tour to the ISS.
Indeed, it was while at Boscombe Down that Reiter found out that he'd been accepted into the European Space Agency's Astronaut Corps.
Frank, on the other hand, was told he'd have to wait. He went into a reserve pool and was finally called up in 1998.
I spoke with him this week in Paris where he was giving a lecture about his experience as ISS commander to the International Astronautical Federation Space Update event.
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He returned to Earth in December and so is still involved in what they call "post-flight activities". He's continuing with some medical and science experiments connected with his OasISS mission, and - of course - he's giving plenty of talks.
We had a long chat about his historic adventure, which marked not just his elevation to the job of the "world's top astronaut" but also saw the orbiting platform move to a six-person crew.
When his Expedition's Soyuz capsule arrived at the ISS in May, it doubled the routine crew complement, and it will now largely stay at six.
The ISS is entering its "full utilisation" phase. For much of the past decade, astronauts have been doing only about 20 hours a week of science on the station. This is now fast approaching 70 hours a week.
I could happily talk to astronauts all day long but they've got better things to do, so you get to fire only a few key questions. But I had to ask Frank first about that Star Trek picture in which everyone under his command dressed in character from the famous TV series:
"Every crew now makes a poster, which is not an official agency poster, but a crew poster, [of] some team - and these are usually teams from movies that are chosen. As the first European space station commander, we made the link - and it was actually my wife Lena who did this - to Star Trek and the Next Generation where Jean-Luc Picard is also from Europe, and he is also the first European commander of the Enterprise."
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When asked to pick some key events during his stay, Frank mentions the first appearance at the station of the Japanese HTV cargo ship, and the arrival in August of fellow European Christer Fuglesang.
The HTV episode was as important one because it was a first demonstration of a procedure that will soon become a regular occurrence - the idea of grabbing visiting vehicles with a robotic arm as they free-float next to the platform, and then pulling them into a berthing point.
The forthcoming US commercial cargo vehicles, Dragon and Cygnus, will follow this procedure.
The thing I love about astronauts is the way they can sometimes make going into space sound like a mundane nine-to-five office job:
"Life is very similar to here on Earth, surprisingly. You get up, you have your breakfast morning routine. And then we have a daily planning conference with the ground in which we go through the plans of the day, and then we start working. Morning work. We have a break of about one hour for our midday meal. Afternoon work. And then in the evening we have another planning conference with the ground, and then it's winding down, having dinner, do some email, look through some movies, look through the window of course to Earth, and then finally go to bed."
Not many of us get to "look through the window to Earth" after the commute home.
Frank is now playing a key role in developing Europe's future role in human space exploration. You may recall there was a conference last October at Stirin Castle just outside Prague in the Czech Republic.
It saw ministers from Esa and EU member-states come together with industrialists and academics to discuss possible directions for the bloc.
The EU has traditionally kept its space endeavours restricted to applications and services - its sat-nav project, Galileo; and the Earth-monitoring programme GMES.
But the EU could now decide to invest in human spaceflight. As we know, the costs are large and if humans really do want to push out beyond low-Earth orbit, back to the Moon and on to Mars, it will almost certainly involve global co-operation.
In other words, some of the questions about Europe's involvement in that endeavour necessarily become political, not just technical.
Frank is chairing the technical committee of the second EU-ESA Space Exploration Conference which will take place in Brussels in the autumn:
"If you look around the world, you have some bigger nations that are engaged in exploration - China, the US, Russia. All of those states, all of those societies, have their internal values. Europe also has its values. If we want to make sure that in a global endeavour the European values are represented, we need to participate."
Such tasks will keep Frank busy. He's keen to go back into orbit, but doubts he'll get another opportunity. In any case, he feels the baton should probably now be passed to Esa's rookie astronauts who were selected just prior to his launch in May last year.
He'll be a robotics instructor to them:
"The first next opportunity to fly to the International Space Station for the slot that is still open, that is not assigned, is 2013. So if you ask me honestly I think the new astronauts should get their chance and a new generation should start flying. I should more concentrate on doing the desk job and supporting them."
As the European captain of the Enterprise might have said: "Make it so!"
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~58~RS~)
I’m 
Comments
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Oh lordy, another quango? I sense that its first agenda item will be to give £100,000 to a PR firm run by some Minister's idiot nephew to design a new logo, slogan, and marketing campaign.
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Why does the EU have to have any involvement with space? What's the point of having launched a national agency for it to be swallowed up into a political project? We cooperate with European states through ESA.
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ESA is the European Space Agency, the EU is (loosely) the pan-European Government. It's natural they come together eventually.
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Memo to Captain De Winne,
If you want to create the future that could lead to the Starship Enterprise, you need to acknowledge that the key areas of future progress are tourism and energy in space!
To talk of "human spaceflight" will get nowhere unless the market for personal space exploration is vastly expanded, with opportunities to fly on economical, reusable aircraft-like vehicles, such as those under development now in the UK. Europe must plan for growth in space, not just hope to copy what America and Russia were doing in the 1960s.
In say 2030 there could be thousands of private visitors visiting space hotels per year, at a million dollars/euros or so per head. How many of them will fly on Arianes? Yet ESA cannot see beyond the concept of a capsule on a throwaway Ariane.
As Alan Bond once said: the space age won't really have started until everyone personally knows someone who's flown in space.
Make that so!
Stephen
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The UK has always taken an askance view at manned space, perceiving it as a lot of money for not much return.
It would be interesting to see how Mr. de Winne and his fellow Euronauts feel about that position.
What benefit does (ISS-style) manned space provide other than scratching big boys' itches and the 'wow' factor. It certainly seems to provide little in the way of monetary or scientific return.
Space, like all the other frontiers, is there to be exploited, no doubt about that. But it makes no sense for it to become a fancy playground, just for the hell of it.
It would be a better use of resources, surely, to maximise science and knowledge in an unmanned capacity, especially in Earth orbit and interplanetary areas. This also provides commercial spin-off.
We can all float around like fools in the freefall tower in Milton Keynes (whatever its called) any time we like if that's the objective.
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The simple and easy way to make space cheaper is to do things on a bigger scale. A single 1000 ton payload launch costs a tiny fraction of 500 20 ton payload launches, it uses a lot less fuel and is also many times greener. Add to that on a larger system better safety and man-rating will tend to be a smaller part of the total costs as well.
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2. Andrew
The EU is the driving force behind Galileo, a significant and necessary piece of European space development. They became involved because industry showed it was incapable of forging a solution between them. If the children won't act sensibly, the grown-ups have to intervene.
Now the precedent is set, the EU will become more and more involved. IMHO, so they should. They could also do worse than form a European space industrial forum and commercial ombudsman.
6. Robert Lucien
Agreed. But what is the benefit and value return of manned Geocentric space? It could be cheaper, but why do it at all? The expense is the man-rating.
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4. Stephen Ashworth
What do you mean by "energy in space"? Do you mean obtaining the raw material for providing propulsion, improving solar array technology, or power generation in space followed by a subsequent transmission to Earth?
"In say 2030 there could be thousands of private visitors visiting space hotels per year, at a million dollars/euros or so per head". I cannot share your optimism. It hasn't happened in deep sea exploration (the closest thing to space ex) and I can't see the business model working for space.
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With greater EU involvement comes greater arrogation of control away from the UK.
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Patrick Moore has apparently commented on UKSA:
"A small step in the right direction," is the verdict of Sir Patrick Moore on UKSA. "We had a wonderful opportunity with launchers like Black Arrow and Blue Streak and we threw it away through bad government and bad management. We plough money into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan when we should spend it on space."
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9. Andrew
I don't see that. The work that the UK gets through ESA's juste retour policy will still be awarded in the same way as when the EU was not involved. As I see it, the EU will not be competing or replacing ESA, just acting as an executive body, so the routes remain the same.
What should change however is the quality and speed of the decision-making process. ESA can appear nepotistic at times and some decisions made in the past have been questionable. Hopefully, with the EU involved, there will be more visibility and less 'scratching of backs'.
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#7 callisto. The whole point of being able to lift large masses into orbit is that you can lift larger more complex spacecraft. Just one or two 1000 ton lifts could put up a really large space station. Or say a full sized Mars mission, or far more advanced probes to places like the moons of Saturn, orbital fuel depots, or even limited colonization.
All those things they promised us from space in the 60's and 70's, they all start with the ability to put large payloads into orbit.
A real world example : For the ISS a single large launch could have literally cut the total costs in half, reducing launch costs by maybe 60 billion dollars.
As for safety a big launcher must have the best redundancy and safety, its cargo's will simply be to large and valuable to lose. Some would have higher danger factors as well. The worst cargo to lose safety wise would be an Orion system fuel store - thats several thousand small nuclear bombs, the kind of cargo that needs a canister that can withstand the complete destruction of the rocket.
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Human-rating the ATV+Ariane system would be a great opportunity for Europe right now.
After the (partial) cancellation of the Constellation programme, a serious roll-out of private options and India/China still being some years away, for the near future the Soyuz capsules will be the only vehicles for human spaceflight. All space agencies represented on the ISS or wanting human flights will be forced to buy from Russia.
Europe could edge into the market, probably cover costs, and establish an independent human spaceflight capability for the first time ahead of the Americans.
It would be a great first step towards an equal relationship in cooperation for later inter-planetary exploration.
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The ESA and EU space programmes are deliberately designed to be complementary: ESA develops the technology, the EU uses consequent operational systems (eg GALILEO, GMES) to support its policies. UKSA should bring more streamlined planning, and hopefully a more coherent (rather than increased) budget into UK participation in both activities.
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#8 Callisto --
I meant the third of those, gathering solar power in space for transmission to Earth. Given the current flap about anthropogenic global warming, I find it incomprehensible that space agencies don't see a practical demonstration of space solar power as a good way to channel public funds into their pockets!
The difference between deep sea exploration and space exploration is that the resources that the latter could open up are effectively infinite. The carrying capacity of the Solar System for human populations should be up in the millions of billions, as people like John S. Lewis, Gerard K. O'Neill and Marshall T. Savage have argued. One way or another, we need a business model that works, if we don't want to resign ourselves to James Lovelock's gloomy view of the future (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8594000/8594561.stm).
In post #7, you asked: "what is the benefit and value return of manned Geocentric space? It could be cheaper, but why do it at all? The expense is the man-rating." The benefit is a profit-making personal space exploration ("space tourism") industry, obviously. The expense is not so much the man-rating, but achieving reliability and reusability of the vehicle, which is exactly what UK spaceplane developers are promoting. The conclusion of the BIS symposium on space tourism a few years ago was: "Space tourism is the key to affordable access to space." I don't see that has changed in the interim.
So how would you get us into space? Or do you think we'll always be confined to a single speck of cosmic dust, only ever be able to send robots out into the infinity of the rest of the universe and only ever be able to view its huge resources and opportunities from afar?
Stephen
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