Time for ESA to chart its own course and reduce NASA dependency

Every four years, when the US elects a new President, NASA is subjected to a leadership churn. NASA chief is replaced and centre heads scramble to save their jobs or pivot to safer pastures. It is that time of the year again. President Trump’s pick for the new NASA administrator is billionaire businessman and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman.[1] Billionaires are the flavour of the Trump presidency, the most influential of the flock being Elon Musk who spent more than a quarter-billion dollars to get Trump elected.[2]

Isaacman claims that he will help usher in what he calls a ‘second Space Age’. Originally the founding CEO of a payment-processing company, Isaacman funded and commanded two SpaceX commercial spaceflights in recent years: Inspiration4 in 2021 and Polaris Dawn in 2024.[3] Isaacman’s appointment still needs to be ratified by the US Senate, which is expected to scrutinise his ties with SpaceX, Musk’s company that conducted these flights and is NASA’s main contractor.   

During his Inaugural Address, Trump promised to launch American astronauts to Mars by 2028. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump said. Musk, a proponent of Mars colonisation, who often shows up donning an ‘Occupy Mars’ t-shirt,[4] promptly followed Trump’s announcement with his tweet “Mars will be called the ‘New World’, just as America was in past centuries”.   

The Moon-Mars seesaw in US space policy is a recurring characteristic of Presidential election cycles. The Bush regime had a Moon focus, Obama’s NASA chief brought Mars back into the crosshair, Trump 1.0 and Biden administration were touting the US return to the Moon through Artemis, and we are now back to Mars with Trump 2.0. This oscillation leads to a waste of time and funds, and sometimes results in mature programmes getting scrapped. It takes a few months for the dust to settle and for the programmatic carnage to emerge.   

There is speculation that Isaacson might cancel NASA’s giant Moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS).[5] The SLS is one of several key elements needed for NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972. Jatan Mehta, an independent space writer and author of the‘Moon Monday’ newsletter opines: “There’s no Starship that can go to Mars but not the Moon. Unless NASA cancels SpaceX’s two awarded Starship Human Landing System (HLS) contracts to land astronauts on the Moon for Artemis III and IV, talks of Mars direct are baseless.”  

For Artemis’ lunar landing missions, the SLS is supposed to launch four astronauts on the Orion crew capsule. Orion will then travel to the Moon. Once in lunar orbit, Orion will dock with Musk’s Starship which will be launched separately. Two astronauts will float into Starship that will undock from Orion and travel down to the lunar surface. If SLS is canned, Boeing the SLS prime, Lockheed Martin and Airbus, which are responsible for the Orion capsule, will be impacted. Further, it will put the Artemis, a programme already beset by spacecraft cost overruns and delays,[6] in jeopardy.

Last month the day after Trump’s inauguration, Finland became the 53rd nation to sign the Artemis Accords, a bilateral non-binding arrangement introduced by Trump 1.0 in October 2024. Several European countries have joined the Artemis bandwagon since. Historically, the European Space Agency (ESA) piggybacks on NASA for human space exploration missions. ESA’s lack of technology independence in this area is starkly visible given that ESA still doesn’t have its own human space ferry.

ESA was collaborating with NASA in the 1990s to build the Crew Return Vehicle (CRV) as a lifeboat for the International Space Station (ISS), but in 2002 NASA scrapped the CRV programme due to budget issues when the prototype was already in the test phase, leaving ESA high and dry. As a result of this decision, after its Space Shuttle fleet retired in 2011, NASA was dependent on the Russian Soyuz for nine years to fly its astronauts to the ISS. NASA finally got its independent ferry in 2020 when the SpaceX Crew Dragon had its debut flight to the ISS. 

Other than Russia and the United States, China has a human space ferry called Shenzhou. Next year, India is planning to test its human ferry Gaganyaan.  

Unlike the US, China and India are pursuing their planetary exploration goals with steadfast focus. They don’t view the Moon and Mars with an ‘either-or’ lens. They see the Moon, Earth’s nearest neighbour as an ideal testbed for technologies to create and sustain future human presence on Mars, as China’s Chang’e and India’s Chandrayaan programmes continue to demonstrate.  

In 2024, Chang’e 6 became the sixth consecutive successful robotic lunar exploration mission by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and the second successful CNSA lunar sample-return mission.[7] China seems to be well on its way to its stated goal of landing humans on the Moon in 2030. Last September, Yang Liwei, deputy chief designer of China’s manned space programme, unveiled China’s moon-landing spacesuit.[8] In 2023, the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3[9] successfully landed near the lunar south pole and tested a lunar rover.[10] The sequel, Chandrayaan-4, a lunar sample return mission is scheduled to fly in 2027.[11]

ESA risks becoming collateral damage to NASA’s changing priorities. The US space programme is now effectively run by Elon Musk. So, let alone ESA, NASA’s own future is uncertain. 

It is time for ESA to strategically de-couple from the US exploration roadmap, chart a course of its own and ally with those who demonstrate focus and continuity – China and India, effectively the East. ESA could emulate India’s approach and pursue strategic autonomy while keeping the door open for international cooperation.

Times have changed, so should ESA, if it wants to stay relevant.  

[1] https://www.forbes.com/profile/jared-isaacman/ 

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/05/politics/elon-musk-trump-campaign-finance-filings/index.html 

[3] https://www.pressreader.com/uk/sky-at-night-magazine/20250121/281857239167724 

[4] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/20/trump-flag-on-mars-how-long/77837668007/ 

[5] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/trump-may-cancel-nasas-powerful-sls-moon-rocket-heres-what-that-would-mean-for-elon-musk-and-the-future-of-space-travel 

[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-05/nasa-again-delays-timeline-for-sending-humans-back-to-the-moon 

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang’e_6 

[8] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/30/style/china-unveils-moon-landing-spacesuit-intl-hnk/index.html 

[9] https://www.isro.gov.in/Chandrayaan3_Details.html 

[10] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66594520 

[11] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/chandrayaan-4-to-launch-in-2027-jitendra-singh/article69187145.ece 

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.