That's was how the Science Minister Lord Drayson opened his speech to the 5th Appleton Space Conference in Harwell on Thursday, and he immediately got an enthusiastic round of applause from all the space scientists and industrialists who were present.

So it's done... Britain will finally get a space agency.

Well, it's almost done. The detail needs to be worked out, and I'm not talking about the competition that will soon open to find a name and a logo.

A cross-government group is going to meet early next year to plan how the agency will work. As part of its discussions, it will need to determine how the new agency will be funded.

As I explained in my news report from Harwell yesterday, there are at least two funding models on the table.

One would see the space funds currently allocated direct to government departments and research councils being issued instead to the agency.

Another model would see the monies remain with the departments and councils, who would then "subscribe" to programmes directed by the agency.

This latter model is how the European Space Agency works.

Quite where we end up in that spectrum is open to debate, but there seems to be a recognition that unless the new UK agency has its hand on a pot of cash (as Esa does with the mandatory subscriptions member states must pay), it is impossible to see how it can direct policy effectively.

As I write this, Lord Drayson is in the position of having to take his flat cap around government departments to ask for contributions to the next Jason sea-level measurement mission.

Without nine million euros from the UK to cover what is about an eight-year programme, one of the gold-plated Earth-observation data-sets detailing the shape of the oceans over the past 18 years could founder.

All the departments think Jason is really important, but it's not their number one priority. As David Williams, director general of the British National Space Centre, so cleverly explained it at yesterday's Appleton conference:

"If you're everyone's second priority, there is a danger you end up with nothing. Whereas, in ice skating, of course, if you come second in every class, you win."

How different would Jason's prospects be today if an executive space agency were setting the priorities?

There is also then the issue of the overall pot of cash in the UK to do space activities - a subject that many of the regulars who comment on this blog like to raise.

This brings me on to something else which came out at the Appleton conference and which got a bit lost in all the hullabaloo over the agency.

This was the release of a document called the Space Exploration Review [1.5Mb PDF].

It considers the opportunities that exist for Britain in the "new space age".

It looks as though we are about to enter an era when commercial space activities really fly, and Big Government will try once more to push humans beyond low-Earth orbit, back to the Moon, to asteroids and to Mars. (Although, given the current recession, the new space age is going to have to wait a bit.)

What role will Britain play in all this? How deeply involved do we wish to become? What activities fit best with our particular expertise? Do we still want to do mainly robotic stuff, or do we want to build on Major Tim and join an astronaut programme?

These are the issues which the Space Exploration Review addresses.

It looks at the technological opportunities that are out there, from the communications systems we could build to support astronauts on the Moon to the next generation of launch vehicles such as Skylon.

In some senses, you could call this document the UK's own "mini-Augustine report". It has a very similar feel to the recent US human spaceflight committee document.

For sure, the questions are on a different scale, but the way the British report works through the options is very much the same. And at the heart of it all is some cold economics.

Anyone who wants to make the case for Britain to spend more money on space has to be able to back that case up with solid reasoning and solid numbers.

It is no use telling Treasury officials that Britain should have astronauts merely because they do "inspirational stuff".

That's not going to wash when there are umpteen competing demands on public expenditure.

You need to explain the logic and detail the benefits, and the Space Exploration Review is one of the best examples I've seen that has tried to do that.

Download it. The main part is 125 pages long. There is also a supporting economic analysis [1Mb PDF].

I've reproduced just one graph from the document on this page which immediately caught my eye. It compares the space budgets of a number of nations as a percentage of their Gross Domestic Product (for 2005). One bar shows the G7 average.

It's the context.

Anyway, my vote for a name for the new space agency would be HMSA - Her Majesty's Space Agency. I'm sure you have some better idea.

Watch this space.

He's run a highly successful airline business for 25 years and he understands consumer confidence.

He realises that his spaceliner business must also engender similar levels of confidence in its customers if the whole venture is to succeed.

And Sir Richard will make the ultimate statement by climbing aboard SpaceShipTwo (SS2) with his family when it goes into commercial service. The qualification process to get to those first flights begins now.

Anyone passing by the Mojave Air and Spaceport in the coming weeks may see something strange. They will witness the rocket vehicle being shaken underneath its carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo (WK2), on the runway.

It will simulate the turbulence the pair might experience in flight.

The SS2 will then be captive-carried aloft by WK2. Initially, these flights will all be about how the two vehicles perform as a unit.

Eventually, WK2 will start dropping SS2 so the spaceship can practise gliding back to the runway.

Then we will see SS2 igniting its "laughing-gas"-and-rubber-fuelled hybrid-rocket engine on some flights.

It will be a gradated process; step-by-step, SS2 will go faster and climb higher, extending its performance and the loading on its airframe. This is the next 18 months. Test flight after test flight.

Deep into 2011, we may see the first sub-orbital missions.

As Will Whitehorn, the president of Virgin Galactic, told me just before he flew out at the weekend for Monday's SS2 unveiling:

"We need to make this safer than driving a car. I don't think we can get it quite to being as safe as flying a jumbo jet because that would take a very long time. But if we can approach those levels, it heralds an entirely new future for access to space, because those reliabilities would then go into our satellite launch business later on."

From my perspective, this is the key point that interests me.

I've already had a lot of e-mails from people commenting on the juxtaposition of SpaceShipTwo's unveiling with the current Copenhagen climate talks; and if you want to make such remarks you are free to do so in the comments field below.

But we have somehow to reduce the cost of access to space. Space-borne services bring enormous benefits to all on planet Earth (see yesterday's blog on MTG) and we could do much more if it wasn't so dashed hard and expensive to get up there.

We are looking to the likes of Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk, who featured in this blog a few weeks ago, to try to break the paradigm we're in; to find ways of doing things a lot cheaper than they have been done in the past.

That might seem a strange thing to say when a ticket on SpaceShipTwo is currently selling for $200,000, but it is where we eventually end up that is important.

Some of the entrepreneurs coming into the space business promise a new approach.

Watch this space.

These spacecraft, along with the ones that relay our TV pictures and phone calls, probably provide the most recognisable and most appreciated services delivered to the citizen from orbit.

And in the next few days Europe will begin the long process of building its next-generation of meteorological satellites, to bring us even more detailed and more accurate forecasts.

This will take the form of an announcement by the European Space Agency (Esa) of the industrial team that will be tasked with constructing the spacecraft and their instruments.

The Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) programme is a colossal one. In scale, it ranks alongside Europe's Galileo sat-nav project and its Gmes Earth observation programme.

At last year's Esa Ministerial Council meeting, member states committed to spend just under a billion euros on MTG in the next few years. But that's just a fraction of it.

The weather satellite service in Europe is operated by another intergovernmental organisation - Eumetsat; and it will spend more than double what Esa is putting into the project.

Very simply put, Esa - as a science and technology research organisation - will lead the development of two prototype MTGs. Eumetsat will operate them and pay for the four follow-up "production models".

If you watch the TV today in Europe and you see satellite images of clouds swirling across the continent, those pictures will have been acquired by the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) series of spacecraft - specifically Metosat-8 and Meteosat-9.

These satellites sit 36,000km above the Earth. As they spin, their instruments scan the weather systems below, and provide (broadly speaking) an update every 15 minutes.

Two more MSGs are in the cupboard and will launch in the next two or three years, guaranteeing European satellite-borne weather data until at least the end of the next decade.

The plan is to have the first MTGs in orbit before 2020, in time for a seamless handover. The next generation will then run until 2040. Think about that. A decision on whether to take a brolly to work in 30 years' time will be shaped by the industrial decisions taken in the coming days.

The new spacecraft will be quite unlike their forebears. The MSGs, for example, are spin-stabilised and build up their images as they rotate across the field of view.

The MTG satellites will look more like standard telecommunications spacecraft. They will sit and stare at the Earth. Their image data will have a much higher resolution and will come down in a fraction of the time - in 2.5 minutes.

There will be many innovations but perhaps the two instruments of major note will be a Lightning Imager, which should give much earlier notice of electrical storms; and an Infrared Sounding Instrument which will detect the layers of moisture in the atmosphere long before they have developed into weather systems.

The sounding instrument should also give improved warning of extreme precipitation events, like the recent one at Cockermouth that saw about 25cm of water dumped on north-west England in just 24 hours.

Two consortia are competing to lead development of the prototype spacecraft. One is headed by EADS Astrium (Germany) and the other by Thales Alenia Space (France).

Germany and France committed a lot of money at the Esa ministerial last year to direct the project. Under the Esa "juste retour" principle of "what you put in, you get back", these two nations are guaranteed the lion's share of industrial work.

It was a smart move because whoever gets to build the prototypes will also get to build the four production models and the cost for those is borne, as I said, by Eumetsat members.

This illustrates one of the key frustrations often mentioned to me by UK industrialists and Earth observation scientists. While the UK will be paying hundreds of millions of euros into the MTG project through its Eumetsat membership, its industry is locked out of much of the satellite work because it put nothing into the Esa subscription.

There will be some sub-system work available for British companies to bid for, but if another, equally good offer is made by a firm in a country that did subscribe to the Esa part of MTG then the British outfit is likely to lose out.

UK industry will therefore be working hard to get contracts on the ground segment, that part of the system which controls the spacecraft and handles their data. This largely falls into the domain of Eumetsat and is not covered by Esa's "juste retour" principle.

Having sat through Tuesday's "beauty contest" of possible future European space missions, I have to say my money is staying firmly in my pocket.

I said I'd report back and I've detailed all the proposed missions here.

They're an impressive bunch and the packed theatre at the Oceanographic Institute of Paris gave each consortium's presentation a hearty round of applause.

They're also a diverse bunch. Euclid, Spica, Plato, Cross-Scale, Marco Polo and Solar Orbiter cover very different fields of science and you could sense the hum move around the room as different quarters took greater interest in those areas that meant more to them.

The stand-out moment, though, was when the last three slides of the day were put up on the big screen.

These contained the estimated total costs to the European Space Agency of the different mission proposals at 2010 prices. The contents of the very final slide I have reproduced on this page.

It shows four of the missions busting the 475m-euro budget ceiling that will be given to the two successful concepts to emerge from the competition.

Only the infrared telescope mission Spica comes well below the red line and that is because the larger costs of this endeavour would actually be borne by the Japanese who will provide most of the spacecraft and the launcher.

And even the other bars on the chart do not tell the whole story because these were solely costs to Esa. On most of the missions, the costs of providing instruments will be borne by national governments, not by the agency.

After a day of gorging on the wonderful scientific possibilities, the slides took a little wind out of the sails.

The immediate reaction of a number of people in the hall - and some consortium members - was that the costing estimates were overly pessimistic.

Some suspected - maybe jokingly - that a kind of "Bepi multiplier" had been used.

This refers to the rapid escalation in costs that has been seen recently in Europe's proposed Mercury mission in 2014, BepiColombo. What was supposed to be a high 600m-euro mission has now become a high 900m-euro mission.

Perhaps the agency was trying to factor in the gloomiest of all scenarios, one space scientist speculated. Certainly, Esa cannot afford another episode like Bepi.

Esa's science directorate insisted, however, that the costing exercise had been detailed, realistic, and transparent.

What is for sure, the cost of these missions as they evolve will be scrutinised as never before.

Professor David Southwood, Esa's director of science and robotics, told me:

"I'm neutral; I don't mind which of the missions goes ahead. I think they're all great. But what I don't want to see go ahead is a mission which is too ambitious for what we're capable of doing right now given our budget. Something that just swallows the programme for five or six years is too much."

One other point of note. It was interesting to see the number of Brits leading the presentations.

Three of the pitches - Spica, Marco Polo and Cross-Scale - were fronted by UK scientists. Indeed, it could have been four if one speaker had not stood back to allow a European colleague to talk through the PowerPoint slides.

The strong British showing was remarked upon by a number of those in attendance.

It was an encouraging sign of the current strength of UK space science.

All that said, these are tough times and one or two in the community came up to prod a finger in my direction and talk about the likely state of future UK funding.

Esa, you might be aware, is one of those "international clubs" that has become more expensive for the British of late because of an unfavourable euro-pound exchange rate.

On Tuesday, it will host a kind of X Factor for future European Space Agency (Esa) missions.

This is part of Europe's long-term planning, called Cosmic Vision, to find the next Medium- and Large-class missions, for launch in the 2015-2025 timescale.

Six teams will get an hour to present their dream project in front of an extremely knowledgeable crowd - their peers.

The prize: something like a 300m-euro budget to make that medium-sized dream come true.

The six competing concepts are:

• Euclid: A mission which will look at the Universe out to a distance of about 10 billion light-years to map the influence "dark energy" has had on cosmic evolution.
• Spica: A cooperative mission with the Japanese that would launch a telescope to study the cosmos at infrared wavelengths.
• Plato: A mission to find and study planets beyond our Solar System.
• Marco Polo: A sample-return mission to a near-Earth object. It would consist of a mother satellite which would carry a lander, sampling devices, re-entry capsule as well as instruments.
• Cross-scale: A swarm of 12 spacecraft (seven from Esa; five from Japan/Canada) to make simultaneous measurements of plasma (charged gas) surrounding Earth.
• Solar Orbiter: An observatory that would go to within 34 million km of our star to study activities unseen by previous probes.

There will be no immediate announcement of a winner, however. Simon Cowell will not jump up on stage at the end of the day with a big cheque.

Instead, an assessment committee will go away and look at the details before recommending which projects should be carried forward into the so-called definition phase.

This will require the remaining teams to put even more commitment into outlining how their missions would be undertaken.

Eventually, it is likely only two projects will be selected for launch, in either 2017 or 2018.

It's a long haul. Discussions on what sort of science Europe ought to be doing under the Cosmic Vision banner began in earnest in 2004.

The first major whittling down of ideas occurred in 2007. There's another two years before a winner in this competition is chosen.

It's not just a case of who will do the most compelling science; it's also a question of who has the best mission plan and the necessary (mature) technology to carry it through.

For those who get to, but fall, at the final hurdle it must be deeply frustrating having invested so much energy and time in an idea only to then get re-buffed.

And for the lucky winners, there is then the hard part of delivering on the promise; and as we have seen in recent weeks with Esa's BepiColombo Mercury mission, the path to the launch pad can be a rocky one.

I'll report back later in the week on how the "beauty contest" went. Watch this space.

The guy can be forgiven for feeling a little stressed right now.

He admitted as much to the BBC when we went to see him at his Hawthorne, California facility last week. SpaceX is getting very close to the maiden flight of the Falcon 9 rocket, and Musk knows that the eyes of the world will be watching:

"On launch day, there is serious pucker factor."

For those who haven't been following this quite so closely, the Falcon 9 is probably the leading candidate right now to lead the commercialisation of low-Earth orbit.

Fitted with its Dragon capsule, the Falcon is being touted by many as the cheaper, faster, but no-less-safe alternative to Nasa's Ares 1 rocket.

The Augustine committee [7Mb PDF], commissioned by President Barack Obama to review US human spaceflight options, said private operators should be incentivised to provide the means of getting cargo and crew into space.

Augustine calculated that Nasa's Ares 1 and Orion capsule would launch for about a billion dollars a time. Elon Musk thinks his big Falcon - the Falcon 9 Heavy - will have a brochure price of just $100m, and possibly substantially less. That's quite a difference.

Of course, until it flies, Falcon 9 remains, as the popular phrase puts it right now, "a paper rocket". A successful first demonstration, though, would make everyone sit up.

You can hear Elon Musk's thoughts on where he thinks his company is right now on this Friday's Science In Action programme on the BBC World Service.

Musk takes us on a guided tour of his 50,000-sq-m factory at One Rocket Road. We hear how the two-stage rocket is put together and the milestones he's hoping to reach:

"I think launch is in the February or March timeframe, so although all the pieces [of Falcon 9] will be [at Cape Canaveral] this month, there's still activity to be done in terms of de-bugging the interaction between the rocket and the launch pad.
 
"We're going through final check-out; we're being very paranoid about everything - double- and triple-checking all the systems in the vehicle, and going through the final regulatory approvals."

Falcon 9 is a two-stage vehicle powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The "9" refers to the cluster of nine Merlin engines at the base of the first stage.

These should offer a high degree of redundancy. Musk says the rocket will be able to cope with the failure of two of these engines in flight and still complete its mission.

The schedule ahead is a tight one.

The first flight will demonstrate that the Falcon is the real deal. The second flight will be mostly about the Dragon capsule and its competence - its manoeuvrability and its ability to return safely to Earth.

The third flight is expected to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

Everything, though, has been designed with the intention one day of carrying astronauts. How soon that might happen will depend to a large degree on President Obama and the view he takes of the Augustine report.

But Nasa itself will have a big say. Even before Augustine, it was seeding the future through its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (Cots) programme.

As Elon Musk says:

"We're very close partners and I'd like to say that we really wouldn't have come this far or this fast without both the financial help of Nasa and some of their guidance."

That first Falcon 9 flight is going to be quite a show. Watch this space.

At the time, it didn't really look like a telescope at all.

Its 3.5m-diameter mirror was not attached. Neither was the large sunshield that would eventually shroud the observatory.

What was on show was the cryostat - the bulbous container that would eventually hold more than 2,000 litres of super-fluid helium to cool the telescope's instruments and detectors, to allow them to see the Universe in far-infrared light.

To be honest, at that stage, Herschel looked more like a coffee flask for a giant commuter than a billion-euro astronomical satellite.

In the latter part of 2008, I pressed the European Space Agency to give me the opportunity to see the finished article; and in January this year I got an invitation to view Herschel in Noordwijk, near Amsterdam, just prior to its launch from French Guiana in May.

Clockwise from bottom-left: A 1998 sketch of SPIRE's optics; an artist's impression of SPIRE; the Herschel instrument bay; SPIRE's first images

Spectacular. Simply amazing. I remember being dazzled by the way the clean room lamps and TV lighting bounced off all the silver foil. And that mirror. It was so perfect, you couldn't quite work out where the surface was.

It's the curved lines and pipes that give Herschel its distinctive look. I don't know what you think but there is something wonderfully "industrial" about it.

I joked the other day with Professor Bruce Swinyard that if someone told you that Herschel ran on steam, you wouldn't argue with them. And quick as a flash, he came back:

"In fact it does run on 'steam', if you think about it - because it's the steam from the helium that cools the system down. The helium is boiling, and as it boils, the steam - in inverted commas - runs around some pipes and cools everything down. So, we're a heat engine, but we're cooling things rather than heating them."

A billion-euro steam engine that operates just fractions of a degree above absolute zero (0K; -273C).

Bruce led the design of one of Herschel's three instruments, SPIRE (the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver). You can hear him and his SPIRE colleagues in two documentaries we've made about the Herschel space telescope for BBC Radio 4.

The first part goes out on Wednesday at 11:00; the second is broadcast the following Wednesday at the same time.

BBC producer Gareth Nelson-Davies was the man tasked with following the scientists and engineers around with a microphone and digital recorder for months on end.

He's pulled the recordings together into a fascinating montage of science and drama. We hear about the development of the telescope, about the stresses of going through a launch, and about the new knowledge the working observatory is likely to deliver.

It's very much a people story - a tale about the struggle to make something remarkable happen.

It's amazing to think that the first time scientists got together to discuss in detail a Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope (FIRST, as it was originally called) was at a workshop in Holland in 1984.

Wind forward and it would be another 10 years or so before instrument development got under way in earnest; and another 10 years after that before a built telescope was ready to go into orbit.

We've only had tasters so far of the image capability of Herschel. In December, we will be presented with its first scientific results. I can't wait.

"How not to implement a large-scale infrastructure project" is the criticism you often hear. "The Common Agricultural Policy in the sky" also became a popular jibe for a while.

Galileo will be at least five years late on its original timescale and hugely over budget.

It should have been fully operational by now and have cost the European taxpayer no more than 1.8bn euros.

As it is, only a partial Galileo system will be up and running by the end of 2013 (the current target date) and the projected total cost to the taxpayer is looking north of 5.5bn euros [PDF].

But things are at least now moving. The ground segment is coming along - see the picture on this page of the shiny control centre in Oberpfaffenhofen in Germany.

And you'll have seen this past week my report on the In-Orbit Validation (IOV) models, the four satellites that will prove the system.

The payloads are nearing completion in Portsmouth, UK, and will soon be despatched to Rome, Italy, for integration with the rest of their spacecraft elements.

The first IOV pair is booked for launch on a Soyuz rocket in November 2010; the second pair in early 2011.

Friday was the deadline day for the satellite consortia to submit their Best and Final Offers (BAFOs) - the final prices at which they are prepared to build the remaining spacecraft needed to operate Galileo.

The satellite segment is just one of six so called "work packages" (WP) that divide up the job of implementing Galileo.

We're expecting very soon - before the year's end - contract announcements on three of these packages:

On System Support, to bring all the elements of the project together; on the Space Segment, to build the satellites themselves; and on Launch Services, to provide the rockets that will loft the spacecraft.

In 2007 when the whole programme was re-shaped, Galileo was given the target of being "fully operational" by 2013; and by that, one would normally mean 27 satellites in orbit. That's not going to happen.

The spacecraft cannot be made fast enough (a Galileo satellite will take two-and-a-half to three years to build) and the launchers are unlikely to be available even if they could.

The primary rocket for the job, a Soyuz, will launch only two Galileo satellites at once; an Ariane 5 will probably be used to loft a few batches of four.

Sixteen satellites plus the four IOVs is the figure now being talked about. Whilst not a full constellation, it is a number that would make a significant difference to anyone using GPS-and-Galileo-enabled receiving equipment.

Nonetheless, Europe had better keep up the momentum if it wants a slice of what could be an exciting future.

GPS has been an immense wealth creator. Anyone who has any doubt about that should go and have a look at the Forbes Top 400 wealthiest people in the USA. Check out the billionaires Gary Burrell and Min Kao.

If you're not sure who these men are, join the first three letters of their names - "Gar" and "Min" - and you'll understand what I'm talking about.

The next generation of sat-nav has the potential for even bigger returns, for the simple reason that location functionality is now becoming ubiquitous in mobile phones.

The improved availability and accuracy of fixes, allied to databases that can be rapidly passed over the cellular networks, means that sat-nav will increasingly be used to do many more interesting things than just finding your way down a motorway.

There is money to be made in the coming years. There are plenty of sharp entrepreneurs out there who realise this and are preparing for it now.

If Europe doesn't grab the chance to exploit the opportunities that are coming, others most certainly will.

Watch this space.

This is the rocket plane Sir Richard Branson will use to take fare-paying passengers on sub-orbital flights in the coming years.

In this posting, however, I want to concentrate on another Galactic project which is now gathering pace - the LauncherOne satellite system.

Back in January, I reported on early discussions between the Branson outfit and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford.

SSTL is a world leader in the production of low-cost small satellites, and it was keen to explore the possibility of working with Virgin Galactic on a way to get these spacecraft into orbit much more cheaply than is currently possible.

The concept would be somewhat similar to the US Pegasus system, which uses a former airliner to lift a booster to 40,000ft, before releasing it to make its own way into space.

Virgin Galactic's aim is to provide an air-launched system which is faster, cheaper, and more flexible.

It would use SpaceShipTwo's mothership, "Eve", as the launch platform.

Dr Adam Baker, then at SSTL, was hoping for some money from the UK government to do a small feasibility study. The hope was that if things came together, LauncherOne could be a UK-built rocket despatched by Eve running out of a British airport somewhere.

Well, the money wasn't immediately forthcoming and Dr Baker has now moved across to Virgin Galactic to lead its own in-house efforts to give the project momentum.

So where are we? Dr Baker has been in post little more than a month. He's speaking to anyone and everyone, from those who might be interested in helping to build such a launcher to those who might want to use it to put a payload into orbit.

Certainly, there's a compelling need for a cheaper, more flexible launch system for small satellites.

At the moment, companies like SSTL are in a less than satisfactory position.

They often have to wait on the availability of converted Soviet-era missiles, such as Dnepr. This can add months to the timeline of a project.

Sometimes, the launches can get bumped by "more urgent" Russian military payloads, or have to wait while a problem on a satellite co-passenger is resolved (small satellites on a Dnepr are launched in batches).

The issue for LauncherOne, of course, is cost.

At the moment, a small satellite wanting to get into space may have to pay something like $5m-$10m. Virgin Galactic really has to get that down to $1m-$2m for this venture to make financial sense.

And to make that happen, Dr Baker believes the development cost of the rocket to first flight also needs to be kept the right side $100m:

"The less we can spend developing this, the easier it is going to be to recoup the cost, and the lower the launch price can be.
 
"Historically, rockets that have been developed from scratch have cost a lot more than $100m. We want to take as much advantage from all the previous 50 years of effort in designing launch vehicles to get the best from the market."

The British imperative is still there. If this vehicle can come out of UK, so much the better, says Dr Baker. He'd love nothing better than for LauncherOne to be a UK-led initiative. But Virgin will not be overly sentimental about this. It's a business.

Interestingly, feasibility studies have been done in this field before in the UK, including on the possibility of using a Vulcan bomber as the platform for an air-launched satellite service. At least one small assessment has found the economics don't stack up.

Perhaps Virgin Galactic and British industry can show otherwise.

Who'd have thought before Brian Binnie and Mike Melville made their historic flights in SpaceShipOne that trips on a civil spaceliner would soon be possible?

Watch this space.

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.

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.

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.

Its full report [pdf 7MB] published on Thursday contains no "recommendations", only "options".

But a careful reading of the document leaves you in little doubt where the panel-members believe the future of American astronauts should lie.

And certainly, the press conference given by committee chairman Norm Augustine and MIT Professor Ed Crawley to present the report sounded very much like the announcement of a preferred route-map to me.

So where is the US headed; what catches the eye in reading the document?

Well, first and foremost, there is now recognition by all that the status quo will no longer work. Nasa cannot do what it is being asked to do on the budget it has.

There are a number of ways you could develop a meaningful human exploration programme, but it is going to take at least an additional $3bn a year to make it happen.

I'm going to start with the space station because it is the element in the equation that probably has the greatest consequence for us here in Europe.

The panel is of the view that the life of the space station really should be extended from 2015 to at least 2020 because, if it isn't, the US will severely damage its international relationships.

Also, it seems a nonsense to have gone to the expense and effort over 25 years to plan and build the station to only then use it for five years (which is the situation we're currently headed towards).

But here's the uncomfortable bit for Nasa. The panel believes the Ares 1 rocket and Orion crew capsule are too expensive and over-engineered to be used for taxi services to and from low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Ares 1 and Orion also arrive too late to be much use in serving the space station - even one with its life extended.

A cheaper, faster solution might be to ask the commercial sector to provide taxi services instead.

Nasa would oversee a competition in which at least two suppliers were brought to market.

The agency would also "seed" the development of the privateers, carrying some of the capital risk so investors could see a return on their investment.

These space taxis would be simple, Gemini-style capsules launched on perhaps an existing, upgraded rocket.

Nasa would set the technical requirements and ensure quality/safety targets were met.

This process would cost the taxpayer the same or slightly less than developing Ares 1 ($5bn), but the ongoing costs would be much cheaper. For example, the lower mass of the private capsules would mean they could put down on land, negating the need for the expensive sea operations required for splash-downs.

In the panel's view an Ares 1/Orion launch to LEO would cost about $1bn per mission. It believes the private sector could do it at a much lower price to Nasa.

The Augustine committee says it has had contact with several companies which are keen to pick up this option. I guess the front-runner right now is the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule being developed by SpaceX in California.

However, the committee recognises there are major risks in following this option. The competition may not deliver - the suppliers could fail, or pull out. This would leave Nasa in a terrible bind and so it would have to have a Plan B up its sleeve.

Augustine suggests the Plan B take the form of accelerating the development of the heavy-lift rocket which America must have eventually anyway if it is going to go beyond LEO.

So if the privateers did go belly up, the heavy rocket could enter into service not far behind.

In Nasa's current plans, of course, the Ares 5 is set to be the heavy-lift rocket, but in its present guise it is not being designed to launch the Orion capsule, only the equipment needed to take the Orion capsule away from Earth.

If Obama does decide commercial is the right course for LEO, then Ares 5 as currently envisioned is also ruled out...

...but what is ruled in, perhaps, is the Ares 5 Lite - a slightly less capable Ares 5 but with the capacity to launch the Orion capsule.

Augustine seems more neutral on heavy-lifters than it does on the LEO solution, but the Ares 5 Lite came out well in the assessments.

And just to be clear, you have to continue with the development of the Orion capsule or you can't go beyond LEO (because the private capsules won't have that capability).

Where the panel really do seem most sure and confident is on where astronauts should go and the route they should take.

Augustine and Crawley championed in the their press conference what they termed the "flexible path" - this idea of moving out to progressively more challenging and exciting targets... to asteroids, loops around Mars, even landing on the Martian moon Phobos.

The report makes this interesting observation:

"It actually requires less energy to fly by Mars than to land on and return from the surface of the Moon. Next in terms of energy requirements is the lunar surface, followed by Mars orbit. The surface of Mars requires the most energy to reach."

All this is for President Obama to ponder. The report is a good read; it's not overly technical. I recommend it. Also, if you haven't seen it yet, read former Nasa Administrator Mike Griffin's critique of Augustine's summary findings [pdf 133Kb].

Dr Griffin has deep reservations about a commercial solution to LEO operations.
He was also annoyed that the committee hadn't seemed to consider what he believed the simplest solution to Nasa's problems - which was to restore the funding Ares had lost and that had knocked it off course.

Watch this space.

Ministers from 29 European Space Agency (Esa) and European Union (EU) member states will tip up at Stirin Castle just outside Prague in the Czech Republic on Friday.

The attendees - which will also include industrialists and academics - are going to discuss Europe's current role in the human exploration of space and how it might change in the future.

Europe is feeling rather good about itself on this issue right now, and with good reason.

Its astronaut Frank De Winne is the current commander of the International Space Station (ISS); it has a sophisticated science lab (Columbus) in orbit; and an impressive robotic cargo truck which will play a leading role in keeping the ISS fully supplied and functional in the years ahead.

But Europe is missing a key capability: the independent means to send its own astronauts into orbit.

And that means most of what Europe does in the realm of human space exploration, it does so at the invitation of the Americans or the Russians.

Europe has looked at developing its own crew transport system in the past - notably the Hermes shuttle - but it has shied away from carrying through sometimes extensive research into an operational system.

Money is an issue, of course. Crew transport systems are not cheap to develop. Just ask the US space agency, which is spending something like $300m a month on developing the various elements of its new Constellation programme.

And looking at Esa's budget line, it's difficult to see where one would find the extra sums needed to produce a manned launch system. Enter, perhaps, the EU.

For those not familiar with how Europe organises itself, it is necessary to realise that Esa and the EU are separate entities; their memberships, although similar, are by no means facsimiles of each other. Esa includes member states that are not in the EU and vice versa.

Nonetheless, in recent years, the two organisations have forged a closer working relationship. They have combined on two multi-billion-euro space projects: one to develop a GPS-like sat-nav system called Galileo; and the other to develop an Earth-monitoring programme called GMES.

The EU saw a political imperative to initiate these two space projects, and called in "the experts" at Esa to try to make them happen.

If you've been following the debate about the Lisbon Treaty, you'll know also that space is to be regarded as a shared responsibility for the EU and its member states.

So could we now see Brussels extend its interests from sat-nav and Earth observation into human space exploration as well?

Don't expect grand announcements from Stirin Castle. This is the start of something, not an end point. Stephan Nonneman is head of the European Commission's Space Policy and Coordination Unit. He told me:

"The intention is to launch the debate on a political level. We will start a process. We will probably have a second conference in a year's time. In the meantime, Commission services together with Esa and the member states are going to explore scenarios, evaluate socio-economic impacts, and study the problematics.
 
We will then have the second conference where the results of this one will be put on the table for further discussion."

Esa has initiated a study to work out how its ISS freighter could be upgraded, first to have the capability to bring cargo safely back to Earth but also - perhaps - to act as a manned spaceship.

Such a vehicle would be launched on the Ariane 5, just as Hermes was designed to do. It might cost five billion euros to make it happen. The assessment will give us a clearer figure.

But if the European Union sees a political imperative in human space exploration then the experts at Esa could conceivably have some extra money behind them to deliver an independent astronaut transport system.

It's all good speculation. Watch this space.

It certainly resonated with this particular boy, who was brought up in the city of Brunel (Bristol) and who went to a school at the end of the runway where Concorde used to take off on test flights.

This misty-eyed reflection has been prompted by something I've just read in an industry submission to the government consultation on whether or not there should be a dedicated UK space agency (see my previous post).

Certain sectors of industry are desperate to see the establishment of a space agency because they dislike intensely the way policy in the UK is currently developed and executed.

They feel the devolution of decision-making and budgets to government departments and research councils has effectively castrated UK space strategy.

They complain bitterly about the way in which these groups (and their wallets) must first be corralled into moving in one direction before Britain can make any sort of commitment to a major European project.

The submission in front of me reads:

"Almost by definition, the current approach ensures that the UK never initiates a European programme but simply finds itself in the position of follower having to take a view on the merits and then, if positively disposed, trying to fight for an appropriate role for its industry and to ensure the system requirements meet UK needs."

This corner of industry believes the present arrangements force it to live off scraps. In particular, to live off the crumbs that fall from the tables of France and Germany. These are the two industrial power-houses in European space activity.

These nations consistently put large sums of money into European space programmes to guarantee their companies get the choice contracts.

Who builds Europe's mighty Ariane 5 rocket? Not the UK. Who builds Europe's biggest, most sophisticated spacecraft, the ATV? Not the UK.

Who is building the Sentinel spacecraft that will spearhead Europe's far-reaching environmental monitoring programme, GMES? Not the UK (not yet anyway).

Who will build the next generation of meteorological satellites for Europe? Not the UK.

Who leads the production of Europe's Earth Explorer spacecraft which will obtain remarkable new scientific datasets on the state of the planet? The UK has just one of the first seven.

Now, for sure, British industry provides important - and often critical - instruments, sub-systems and components. But I'm left asking myself: when was the last time this particular reporter went to a British factory to witness the grand unveiling of a major European spacecraft prior to launch?

I'm hoping it will happen soon with the Lisa Pathfinder satellite, which will test the technology needed to detect the ripples in space-time generated by colliding super-massive black holes. Or perhaps Aeolus, a satellite to measure the Earth's winds.

British industry is acting as the prime contractor on these missions. To find the last major European spacecraft on which UK PLC had the same role, you have to go back to the likes of Envisat at the beginning of this decade, and even into the 1980s and the comet-chasing Giotto probe.

But does that really matter? Does it really matter to the UK Met Office who builds the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) spacecraft so long as it gets the data from them to make its weather forecasts?

Does it matter to British land hydrologists and oceanographers that Europe's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (Smos) satellite, due to launch in a couple of weeks, was built in France and Spain, just as long as they too have access to the data?

If you are just a "user" of space, the answer might seem to be "no, it doesn't matter". And this explains a lot about current British space policy. It's driven by "user need", for the reasons I've previously posted on.

But go back to that quote: "... and to ensure the system requirements meet UK needs." That is an interesting segment.

It reminds me very much of some comments I received last year from Professor Alan O'Neill, the director of the UK's National Centre for Earth Observation. He was concerned at the time that the "user wallets" would not find sufficient unidirectional momentum to give Britain a plum role on one of the forthcoming GMES Sentinels. He said:

"If we are a downstream recipient of data, a third-party user, we will not be involved in influencing the agenda and the prioritisation for the instruments. Our industry will not be competing to build those instruments.
 
"And by not having close proximity to the actual data, we will lose first-mover advantage, not just in science but in downstream applications. So we're either in the vanguard and mixing it, or gradually over time we will become third division."

In other words, it matters even to the users of data that the UK actually gets to lead the production of major European spacecraft from time to time.

The point he was making - and industry has now made to the space agency consultation - is that it is by building things that you gain influence.

Incidentally, picking up the previous post, if you want to read the STFC submission, it is now online.