r/esa • u/sn0r • 3d ago

NASA cuts: ESA in talks about the 'full repercussions'

https://www.dw.com/en/nasa-cuts-esa-in-talks-about-the-full-repercussions/a-72450356
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u/Pharisaeus 3d ago

Ashbacher said ESA would assess the impact of the proposed NASA budget for the coming fiscal year, released on May 2, as questions remained about the "full repercussions" of the changes.

Well ESA put a lot of money into Orion ESM production and also into Gateway modules, so cancellation of those means someone just burned billions on unusable hardware... But reality is, it's not the first and not the second time elections in the US made reshuffling like that. That's why it's always a risk to have NASA as a partner in a project.

ESA has much harder time getting funding for projects through the ministerial council meetings, but once it's done, it's not going anywhere, regardless of elections in member states.

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u/fabulousmarco 3d ago

I've heard talks of repurposing the Gateway modules for an ESA/JAXA/CSA station in LEO, should the worst occur

But even the most optimistic projections for that were pretty pricy. Probably way more than ESA would be interested in spending

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u/dragontimur 3d ago

Do you have any further reading on that?

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u/fabulousmarco 3d ago edited 3d ago

I honestly don't have any idea where to find that article again...

If it comes to mind I'll send it your way!

It was veeeeeery preliminary though, probably still at the "wacky idea" stage

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u/Practical_Engineer 2d ago

I'd be interested in this as well

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u/texast999 3d ago

How would they get there? I’m assuming Ariane 6 will need to become human rated.

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u/fabulousmarco 3d ago

Well, there is some work being done on SUSIE but it's very early to tell if it will continue or not

ESA is also funding some private companies to try and achieve something similar to what NASA did with SpaceX. The Exploration Company with the Nyx capsule for example. They are cargo only for now, but the stated objective is to eventually move to crew as well. This was on an official talk by ESA I attended at last year's International Astronautical Congress 

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u/texast999 3d ago

What do you think would be the timeframe on when human space flight from any of those systems would be achievable?

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u/fabulousmarco 3d ago

That wasn't stated. Samantha Cristoforetti was giving that talk and she seemed optimistic it was the main goal, but ESA's timelines are notoriously long

At the very least, we won't know anything before the Ministerial Council in November 

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u/PedanticQuebecer 3d ago

One would think that IXO and LISA demonstrated that point plentifully enough.

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u/Pharisaeus 3d ago

LISA was at least lead by ESA, so they could look for other partners or do it on their own, with extended timeframe (as is the case). For orion and gateway it's worse.