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Two European organizations – one concerned
with space, the other with defence hope closer
ties can help them avoid duplication and reduce
the cost of space activity where they have shared
interests. These areas include satellite remote-sensing
and communications. Other activities of common
interest focus on intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance, and civil-military synergies in
Earth observation and critical space technologies
where the EU does not want to be totally dependent
on suppliers from outside the EU, informed Jean-Jacques
Dordain, ESA Director General . Although ESA and
EDA include many of the same states in their membership
(EDA is part of the EU’s Common Foreign and
Security Policy), they are actually separate legal
entities, he added.
“Europe's drive for technological non-dependence
in space will not extend to manned spaceflight
capabilities. a key lesson of the International
Space Station experience is that ISS partners
have made a collective mistake in failing to devise
a common transport policy,“ said Dordain.
Addressing the press at the Paris Air Show, Dordain
said that following the final flight of the US
Space Shuttle later this year there will be just
one route to the space station, via Soyuz. "
“We are very upbeat about Galileo which
is a a European answer to GPS. It will be much
more precise than current GPS system. It can give
directions upto three metres. An ambulance will
be able to detect an accident on the highway.
It will also give more precise air traffic control.
It is a civilian system so it will not be blocked
by military authorities,” said Franco Bonacina,Head
of Protocol, Director General’s cabinet.
“Budgeted at 3.4 billion euros and designed
as a constellation of 30 satellites in medium
Earth orbit and an elaborate ground network to
provide the same positioning, navigation and timing
services as the U.S. GPS, Russian Glonass and
Chinese Beidou/Compass systems. The first two
satellites of the Galileo constellation will launch
on 20th October 2011,two more in February/March
2012 and the rest by 2014.” he added.
Bonacina informed that ESA's second Automated
Transfer Vehicle robotic cargo ship, Johannes
Kepler, was de-orbited on 21 June following its
successful mission to deliver supplies and spare
parts to the International Space Station. ATV-3,
Edoardo Amaldi, is scheduled for launch in February
or March 2012, followed one and two years later
by a fourth, to be named Albert Einstein, and
fifth ATV.
Out of six Work Packages for Europe’s satnav
system to reach full operations, four are already
in place. The remaining two were signed at Le
Bourget between Laurent Wauquiez, French Minister
for Economic Affairs, and Jean-Jacques Dordain,
ESA Director General. Commission Vice President
Antonio Tajani that a broad effort at cost containment
had concluded that a round of cost-saving efforts
had reduced the overrun to 1.4 billion euros.
Tajani said the lower figure would make it easier
for the commission to argue for the funds needed
to complete Galileo. Galileo is more than just
satellites in space, it is a complex terrestrial
infrastructure will monitor the constellation
and maintain Galileo navigation services, he added.
The first map of sea-ice thickness from ESA’s
CryoSat mission was also displayed at Le Bourget
by ESA. From an altitude of just over 700 km and
reaching unprecedented latitudes of 88º,
CryoSat has spent the last seven months delivering
precise measurements to study changes in the thickness
of Earth’s ice. Volker Liebig, ESA’s
Director of Earth Observation Programmes presented
the map and said, “What’s really nice
about these results is that they show not only
that the hardware is really excellent – which
we already knew – but that it can deliver
the geophysical information we need too.”
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