San Francisco Frontiers - Europe to negotiate with NASA on lunar missions: ESA

The US space agency announced recently it is suspending its so-called Gateway lunar orbital space station efforts in order to focus on building a base on the Moon's surface.

This left the European role in future exploration unclear. The ESA had an agreement with NASA for three astronaut flights to Gateway.

"The Gateway is postponed, therefore I will need to sit down with the administrator, that means Jared Isaacman, and the NASA team, to negotiate how these seats that have been earmarked for the Gateway can be utilized for the surface," ESA head Josef Aschbacher told AFP, speaking in English.

A German astronaut had been slated to fly first, followed by a French astronaut and later an Italian.

Aschbacher was speaking from the Kennedy Space Center, where phase two of the Artemis program proceeded Wednesday with a successful rocket launch of three Americans and one Canadian astronaut on a mission to fly around the Moon.

The ESA director general said "this is a discussion that needs to take place right now."

"How many seats for the surface flight, or under which conditions, or what is the countervalue that Europe needs to bring into this bargaining and this discussion?" he said.

"The goal is to have Europeans walking on the Moon," said Aschbacher, an Austrian who has helmed ESA since 2021.

"But of course, the dream, or the objective, is that eventually Europe develops its own technologies and capacities to have more autonomy on human spaceflight."

Europe was to provide components of Gateway -- some already built, others under development. The Japanese space agency (JAXA), another NASA partner, was carrying out similar efforts, and currently has a Japanese astronaut scheduled to travel before the first European.

J.Martinez--SFF