Probably just about as much as it pisses me off. We’re giving away our commercial space industry for no better reason than Republicans scoring political points against Mr. Schwartz and the Clinton Administration.

— Donald

Keeping it pretty quiet? ESA has a spacecraft in orbit around the Moon even as we speak.

As I stated, the Europeans are doing exactly what you say that they should, ignoring the U.S. and forging their own path to the solar system.

Europe is focused on freeing themselves from ITAR right now and trying to figure out what the U.S. is going to do with ISS. These two issues will determine the relationship between the U.S. and Europe in space in the future. The U.S. has no conception about how much ITAR pisses off Europe. It pervades every meeting that I go to there.

Dennis

— Donald

Having gone to secondary school in England, I’m probably better able to see the world in “old world” eyes than most Americans, and that does not change my opinion here. Much like the Democratic Party in America, if the Europeans are to succeed they must stop looking to the past or reacting to what others do, and create a foreward-looking agenda of their own. In space, like too many other endeavors, I don’t really see that in Europe.

— Donald

You are missing the point. You are looking through American eyes at this. The European’s are interested in the Moon, they even did their own study called Moon 2025 about the European vision for lunar exploration.

Interestingly, the starting premise was to pretend that NASA did not exist, and then think about what a European lunar development might look like.

Very interesting results. ESA did the study and even wrote it up and published it and then quashed it. The ideas are still there though.

The point is that Europe’s ideas about space development are diverging from the American view, mostly because NASA and the U.S. is seen as an unreliable partner, based upon some very valid experience. How many billions of Euro’s did they spend on ISS and now NASA says, “ok we don’t like this anymore, we are going to do something else”. What happens when a new administration comes in and changes its mind once again?

Tough question.

Dennis

— Donald

Right now Europe is in the process of spending their space dollars to create an ITAR free industrial base for space. I spend a fair amount of time over there and they are not really that interested in what the U.S. is doing, especially since Griffin wants to abandon ISS after Europe put several billion dollars into the program and now feels cheated.

Dennis

This attitude is unfortunate, but will ultimately hurt Europe far more than it hurts anyone else. Nobody knows today if there is anything on the moon worth trading — though oxygen at least looks like a good bet — but if there is, Europe will be the China of the next hundred years. Just as important, Europe will miss out of the science that true expeditions can achieve on the moon, e.g., precise dating of cratering episodes in the early Solar System; retrieval of early continental and even oceanic crust splashed up to the moon with records of the early development of life on Earth; geochemical knowledge of the moon, impactors, and splashed up material from other bodies like Mars; and the inevitable discoveries that cannot be anticipated.

— Donald