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Europe’s showcase space missions are in trouble. Both Hermes, a French
inspired space plane, and Columbus, Europe’s contribution to the US-led
international space station, are seriously over budget. Now the European
Space Agency (ESA) is struggling to find a way of cutting costs without
frustrating the national aims of its member states, in particular France
and Germany.

The agency must have proposals in place by 20 November, when ministers
will decide the future of the two projects. The agency has already postponed
the meeting once because of lack of agreement on cost-cutting measures.

That delay has caused problems for European industry. Last month, ESA’s
industrial policy committee held several meetings to decide what contracts
could be awarded before the November decision. Jorg Feustel-Buechl, head
of space transportation at ESA, said the delay was ‘adding confusion to
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The agency’s financial difficulties were exacerbated on 10 July when
the German government published its budget. Heinz Riesenhuber, Germany’s
Minister of Research and Technology, says that the DM 9.252 billion ( £3.2
billion) allocated to his ministry for 1992 ‘would not be sufficient’ to
allow Germany’s contributions to European space projects to go ahead as
currently planned. He says that Germany is DM 200 million short of the money
needed.

The decisions to build Hermes and Columbus were made in 1987 at a meeting
of ministers from ESA’s member states in The Hague. At the same meeting
a third project was also approved: Ariane 5, a more powerful version of
Europe’s launch vehicle.

Each programme is technically dependent on the others, and together
they have the goal of giving Europe the ability to put people in space independently
of both the US and the Soviet Union. The technical interdependence, combined
with strong national interests is a big problem for the agency. Somehow
it must cut costs without offending any of the major players in the space
game, and make changes to some elements without pushing up the cost of others.

The delicate balancing act arises because Hermes is over budget by 32
per cent and Columbus by between 20 and 25 per cent. In 1986 currency, Hermes
was supposed to cost 4.4 billion accounting units and Columbus 3.7 billion.
(An accounting unit today is worth 71 pence). According to ESA’s rules,
if a programme exceeds its budget by 20 per cent or fails to meet its original
objectives, individual member states can withdraw. Yet, if Germany insists
on withdrawing from Hermes, the project favoured by the French, France could
equally insist on withdrawing from Columbus, the German favourite.

Adding to this difficult situation has been Germany’s insistence that
ESA’s overall budget should be reduced by 15 per cent of the figure agreed
at The Hague. Bonn’s anxiety stemmed initially from the vast expense of
the programmes, and grew as the cost of German reunification became clear.

Of the three projects, Ariane 5 is the least controversial. The rocket
should be ready on schedule for a first launch in 1996. It is only five
per cent over the original budget of 4.1 billion accounting units and so,
under ESA’s rules, is out of the financial dice game.

However, Hermes has run into a lot of difficulties. Some of these stem
from the decision that it should be launched by Ariane 5. The rocket will
be able to lift 22 tonnes into a low-Earth orbit. Consequently, the designers
must pack the life support and safety systems needed for a crew-carrying
space plane, as well as the electronic paraphernalia of space flight into
a vehicle weighing no more than 22 tonnes.

The safety requirements for Hermes became much stiffer, and much heavier,
as ESA’s engineers learned from the shuttle disaster in 1986. The engineers
must also reserve 3 of the 22 tonnes for the astronauts and equipment for
specific missions they will carry out. Roger Vignelle, director of space
transport systems at France’s National Centre for Space Studies, says: ‘Industry
says it does not have the necessary margin to keep the weight down to 22
tonnes while respecting the 3-tonne payload.’

Faced by these technical problems, ESA has revised its plans and stretched
out the development programme for Hermes. The first test flight is now scheduled
for the year 2000, not 1998, and the first flight with crew aboard has been
put back to 2001. As with all big engineering projects, stretching the development
time cuts annual costs, but adds to the total.

Currently, ESA’s principal idea for reducing the costs of Hermes is
not to build a second space plane when originally planned, but to make one
much later from components built for design testing.

If that is still not cheap enough, a radical option would be to build
an automatic, unmanned plane. But without people on board, Hermes could
not fulfil its stated main goal, which is to service Columbus.

Another option is not to build a space plane, but to continue developing
the technologies essential for space travel, such as lightweight composite
materials. ‘If the political will, but not the finance is there, we would
have to look at the idea of keeping Hermes as a technology programme, say
until 1994, and then get back to a development programme,’ says Vignelle.

Despite the budget problems, France sees last week’s annoucement by
Vice President Dan Quayle, as a good reason to press ahead with a European
space plane. Quayle said that the US plans to follow a ‘new launch strategy’.
Exactly what that will be is not yet clear but it does not spell the end
of manned space flight.

Meanwhile, in light of the space plane’s technical difficulties, the
Germans believe a good way to reduce ESA’s budget would be to cut Hermes
altogether. Rainer Jansen, a spokesman for the German Ministry of Research
and Technology, says: ‘Hermes is the most endangered because it’s the furthest
away from being finished and it is a political project.’ If Hermes were
to be cut, Columbus, for which Germany and Italy pay the lion’s share, would
have more than enough funding.

Karl Kaiser of the research institute at Germany’s Foreign Policy Society,
believes that political considerations will force a compromise. In May,
Kaiser testified before the German parliament that he believed pulling out
of Hermes would do serious damage to Franco-German relations. Later, he
told ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ: ‘Germany’s backing out and forcing France to abandon
a project in an area where it has been a leader would be a severe blow to
French prestige, both domestically and internationally.’

Offending the French might also scupper Germany’s chances of winning
support for its own space plane, Sanger. Capable of horizontal takeoff and
landing, Sanger is seen as the next generation of spacecraft. The technology
that Europe learns while developing Hermes will be important in Sanger’s
development. If Germany decided to go ahead with Sanger, it would want to
play the lead role, But according to Carsten Kreklau from the Federal Association
of German Industry ‘we could not go it alone’.

If the end of Franco-German deliberations is that Hermes should be saved,
and no way can be found to reduce its cost, Germany’s favoured project,
Columbus, is the only counter remaining on the board.

Columbus has three components. A satellite carrying a suite of remote
sensing instruments is expected to get full approval at the ministerial
meeting in November. The second element is a pressurised laboratory that
will be attached to the main space station; scientists will live in a module
supplied by the US, and work in the European laboratory and two others provided
by the US and Japan.

The third part of Columbus is a smaller laboratory, orbiting separately,
which will not be pressurised. Every six months, spacesuited astronauts
will visit the laboratory, known as the Columbus Free Flyer (CFF), to change
experiments. This ‘internal servicing’ is the central task for Hermes, but
some rumours circulating in Germany suggest that it might be dropped. If
this rumour becomes fact, it would be a radical alteration to the Hermes
programme.

In Washington, Derek Deil, the senior ESA engineer responsible for liaison
with NASA on the Columbus programme, says his engineers are proceeding with
a review of the cost of Columbus on the basis that Hermes would continue
to have this important role. The only alternative to Hermes for internal
servicing of the CFF would be the shuttle. But sources associated with the
US programme say that if the shuttle were to undertake that role there would
have to be far closer liaison than there is now between CFF engineers and
NASA’s Office of Space Flight.

In response to budget overruns and German pressure, ESA has instructed
its engineers working with NASA to cut between 500 million and 600 million
accounting units from Columbus. The reductions in size that ESA can make
to its attached laboratory to save money are limited, because it has binding
agreements with NASA about the amount of European laboratory space that
US scientists will have access to in exchange for NASA providing the space
station infrastructure and shuttle launches.

Nevertheless, in agreement with NASA, ESA has reduced the size of its
attached laboratory. This will bring savings of about 100 million accounting
units, according to Romano Barbera, head of the Columbus programme office
at ESA in Paris.

The CFF was originally designed to dock with the space station, and
Deil says that the biggest savings would be achieved by cutting out this
capability. Removing the expensive radar and communications for docking
and the special propulsion systems needed for operations close to the space
station, might save another 100 million accounting units. The exact figure
is not yet clear, because ESA is still working out the technical consequences
of its proposed action.

Growing opposition

A decision not to dock with the spacestation would create a whole new
set of problems for the engineers. The original idea was that every five
years the CFF would rendezvous with the space station to exchange an external
module carrying the propulsion units, batteries and solar arrays needed
to keep CFF in orbit. But, if the CFF has no docking equipment, other arrangements
will need to be made. ‘The deletion of the docking process is not controversial.
What is controversial is what to do afterwards,’ says Barbera.

In Washington, the engineers have been instructed to simplify their
approach. If not visiting the space station makes changing the external
module difficult, then don’t change it. Instead, ESA is working on a plan
to reduce the design lifetime of the CFF from 30 years to 10, so that the
external module will not have to be changed. If solar arrays can be designed
to last for 10 years instead of 5 years, this option could be technically
feasible. In the meantime, Barbera says, ESA is looking for the ‘optimal
blend of shuttle and Hermes servicing’.

Whatever compromise ESA eventually works out to satisfy the French and
Germans, both governments need to overcome growing scientific opposition
within their own countries. The German Physics Society opposes the expenditure
on Columbus and growing numbers of politicians are questioning the purpose
of the space station.

In France, scientists are preparing a new offensive against manned space
flight. The Academy of Sciences’ committee on space research is to hold
a meeting on Hermes which is expected to condemn the programme’s cost and
to question its validity. The committee has already published a report questioning
the usefulness of microgravity investigations such as studying crystal growth.
Although the life sciences are the main scientific goal of the space station,
microgravity experiments are also planned.

In the US, where the space station has just survived the most determined
effort to date to kill it off, some scientists argue that the entire project
is unjustifiable on scientific grounds.

But perhaps the most novel criticism in the whole manned space flight
debate is reserved for Hermes rather than Columbus. Manfred Mahning of the
European Foundation for Physical Sciences in Strasbourg, says that Hermes
can’t even be justified to the European public as good entertainment value.
‘Even if you argue that the scientific merit is very slim, but that it will
entertain a lot of people, the costs are excessive. It costs as much as
several Olympic Games. Voyager and Giotto (the satellite that encountered
Halley’s Comet) had sufficient entertainment value for the expenditure,
but Hermes is the same old show as the shuttle.’

Additional reporting by Helen Gavaghan in Washington DC.