EU pledges billions for space programme

Europeans have delayed their scheduled Mars trip by three years. (Photo: European Space Agency / NASA)

EU pledges billions for space programme

VALENTINA POP

Today @ 09:45 CET

European ministers pledged €10 billion for space programmes, saying that investments in high technology would help the continent's economy regain strength, currently very much weakened by the ongoing crisis.

"Investing money in long-term space projects is an appropriate answer to the economic crisis," French education minister Valerie Pecresse said on Wednesday (27 November) after a two-day ministerial meeting in the Hague aimed at securing the budget for the European Space Agency (ESA).

The new money would help build new Earth observation satellites and maintain ESA's participation in the International Space Station, which celebrated its tenth anniversary last week.

"Money paid for high technology is good money for the European economy, and I think it will help us to leave the economic crisis and to gain new economic strength," Peter Hintze, German state secretary for technology told BBC News.

Headquarterd in Paris, the ESA consists of 18 countries – EU's old 15 member states, plus Switzerland, Norway and the Czech Republic.

Agency officials had drawn up a "wish list" valued at €10.4 billion and hoped to get at least 90 percent of that figure. But their expectations were exceeded, with the meeting approving a budget line of €9.9 billion - over one billion more than the commitments made the last time the ministers met in Berlin, in 2005.


http://euobserver.com/9/27187">Full article here

Well, hate to say it, but all the long term billions of investment into space exploration is becoming dead space between their own ears
that they should investigate first. It isn't the money that is the big question. It isn't the exploration either. We need to go there. We
have to do it. It's human destiny, to try to get there.

However,....

Ever since the first discovery of the power of explosions, explosive force has completely fascinated, even obsessed, humanity.
The first cave man likely saw a rock explode in a fire. A piece might have hit something or someone. There it all begins. The
quest for explosions has never ended. Combustion and explosion became the two main driving forces of most of what we
know today.

In the early 1990s I remember talking to a NASA senior researcher. He was a plasma physicist. He still held to the conviction that
the biggest, most powerful, explosions that can be created by humankind, would drive our vessels out into deep space. There was
the promise in bigger, better explosive, combustive, technology.

Nevertheless,....

That isn't the way. We are fast approaching the point in human history when investing in the world's most powerful combustion
based engines, rockets, and in explosive forces, to drive our technology into space, is wrong. Simply wrong. We are still on the
old path, and unwilling to find new scientific directions. Partly the power of the atomic bomb, has become a force that drives us
to an even deeper and more profound obsession with combustion, explosion, and its incredible power. Nope. Wrong way.

It is time to start investing in non combustion, non explosive, propulsion into space.

Unbelievable as that might seem to the all too common human mind, conditioned almost completely by experience into the
belief that combustion and explosions are the only way to propulsive power, we will never get to where we need to go
unless we stop thinking as we have for countless millenia. We must stop thinkiing combustion and explosion.

The way to the distant stars is neither combustion nor explosion.

Cheers.

Robert Morpheal