ESA Wants Space Companies to Connect and Guide Moon Missions
PARIS (ESA PR) — Are you ready to join ESA’s initiative to support European space companies to create a constellation of lunar satellites that connect and guide missions to the Moon?
Creating lasting telecommunications and navigation links with the Moon will enable sustainable space exploration for the hundreds of lunar missions that are due to launch within the next few decades. As part of its efforts to promote European leadership, autonomy and responsibility, ESA is inviting space companies in Europe and Canada to provide telecommunications and navigation services to these lunar missions, under its Moonlight initiative.
ESA is completing two studies with two consortia of space companies based in Europe that assess the business case and the technical solutions for building and operating a constellation of lunar satellites. ESA is now asking any space firms to indicate whether they would like to become involved in the ambitious project – or simply to develop lunar telecommunication and navigation technologies and products. The deadline is 28 October.
Some 250 missions to the Moon will launch over the next decade alone, according to market analysists Northern Sky Research, which the company predicts will activate a €100 billion lunar economy, creating jobs and prosperity on Earth.
ESA will either lead or be an international partner in many of these missions, including those that envisage a permanent lunar presence. Space companies based in Europe and Canada involved in Moonlight would thus have an anchor customer, while being free to sell lunar communications and navigations services and solutions to whoever else wants to buy them.
ESA is going to the Moon together with its international partners. On 19 September, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson signed a joint statement on lunar exploration cooperation at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris. NASA’s Artemis programme plans to return humans to the Moon. In cooperation with ESA and other partners, NASA intends to build the lunar Gateway – an outpost in orbit around the Moon that will serve as the staging point for both robotic and crewed exploration of the lunar south pole.
ESA is constructing the European Service Modules that will power all Artemis Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back, as well as a habitat and refuelling elements for Gateway plus a communications module that will pave the way for Moonlight.
ESA has already initiated the Lunar Pathfinder project to provide initial communications services to early lunar missions, which will also help to prepare for the next stage with Moonlight. The Lunar Pathfinder will also include a navigation payload demonstrator, which will allow positioning in lunar orbit using GPS and Galileo systems for the first time, and is due to launch in 2025.
ESA’s European Large Logistics Lander – a lunar lander that could be used to supply the proposed lunar village or deliver scientific missions to the Moon’s surface – is being designed so that it can benefit from the Moonlight constellation for telecommunications and navigation.
Using Moonlight means the lander will not have to only rely on a line-of-sight connection with the Gateway. Moonlight will improve the accuracy of its landing, and enable access to areas out of sight of the Gateway. Science missions using Moonlight will be able to live stream more high-quality video than would be possible without it, increasing the volumes of data and the speed of transfer and thus enabling better science to be done.
Once Moonlight is in place, companies could create new services in industries such as education, media and entertainment – as well as inspiring young people to study science, technology, engineering and maths, which creates a highly qualified future workforce.
Moonlight will be part of the ESA proposals due to be approved and funded at the Council of Ministers in November – a meeting of government ministers from each of ESA’s 22 Member States that last met in 2019 to establish ESA’s strategic direction and funding.
Space companies in Europe and Canada will be invited to tender for the initial Moonlight work in December.
11 responses to “ESA Wants Space Companies to Connect and Guide Moon Missions”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
interesting
Even more interesting if any of this stuff actually happens. I wish the Euros well, but they’ve earned a fair amount of skepticism over the years.
they really dont see a lot of value in human space flight and are well over our “bust with pride” theory
Which is why they are so dependent on others and their technology lags. Actually it is more of a symptom of how the two world wars broke Europe, forcing them to become completely dependent on the USA.
the last statement is fantasy
the Europeans easily match us in technology if its metriced by dollars/euro’s spent. We have the ability to deficit spend so almost anything can be had, but the Grippen is for instance on par with the F35…this has been catastrophic in some cases. the LCS apparantly cannot be fixed for any amount of money. SLS is a substandard product because it was about money spent rather than product end, the Ford is another example.
the Europeans simply do not place the value on chest thumping “we are number 1 in this or that technical thing” that we do. their orientation is more toward individual value
I would suggest that “their orientation” is more toward “let the U.S. spend the vast bulk of the money”…whether it’s NATO or NASA.
while I do not completely agree or disagree with that statement it is at least one of the talking points which are in the mix in terms of defining reality. Back many many years ago when I had an exchange tour in Sweden with their superb AF…there were two German mid level officers there and we had some good talks between ourselves as well as in group about the general theory of European defense. this has been somewhat updated by my oldest daughter who has spent the last two years imbedded with the Royal Navy as well as the last year or so more or less in Europe planning to fight the Russians. She and I have frequent conversations on the issue…
military power takes money and resources and when you get onto the scale of super power status it takes enormous amounts of it. thats not hard to confirm . after the around 60 percent of the US federal budget on the “entitlements” descrestionary spending is about 1.6 or so trillion dollars
Of that 1.6 trillion the DOD takes up about 800 billion and then we add to that VA, homeland security, DOE etc. so its close to 900 billion. Unless Europe were to act with single purpose collectiveness which is decades away (maybe more) there is no way that their defense spending even becomes a sizeable fraction of that. The UK could not for instance sale its two carriers if the US did not supply them.
The US takes on that burden because when we have stopped *such as the Clinton draw down” our domestic politics suffer…and of course our opponents the PRC and RF are spending on a massive scale as well…and now seem quite determined to use that military.
Should Europe as a whole increase that number? I am not sure they want to both for the issue of what it would take out of their standard of living but also what it would mean for various governments in Europe having the power to literally take over the rest of Europe (we have seen this act before)
an interesting test for Europe will come in say 5 years if the Ukraine and Biden are successful in taking on Putin and defeating him. Ukraine will literally be the strong man of Europe. They will have a very well oiled military, and the US will rebuild the country much as it did Germany after WW2. The country has 1) the resources 2) the drive and 3) the solidarity coupled with 4 the taste of the need for a massive military….to essentially become the heart of Europe. see how everyone reacts to that.
As for NASA. intermixed with nearly 900 billion of US Defense spending we spend what 25 or so billion on NASA. this would not even pay 1/3 of the cost of the LCA platforms. we dont put that much effort into it anyway…because few in this country see a reason why. Europe seems to mimic that
nice debate here
Whatever Ukraine will be, post-war, it won’t be “the strong man of Europe.” It will take a decade to rebuild the place, even with a lot of U.S. money. It’s hardly a cinch bet, for example, that all of the refugees who fled will return to help either. But Ukraine’s pre-war demographics were as bad as those of the rest of Europe anyway, so maintaining a million-man standing army isn’t going to be a live possibility for Ukraine any more than maintaining 15 million men under arms was for the U.S. after WW2. And a shrinking labor force and growing retiree contingent is going to make it harder and harder for Ukraine to do much beyond the same slow slide into demographic eclipse as most of the rest of Europe. Europe, as a whole, is disappearing.
Maybe but unlikely. the right wing in this country is busily pulling our culture apart over their goofy religion…but wars have a habit of uniting people (real ones anyway) and its likely that Ukraine will come out of WW2 much as the US did particularly as we give it modern industry. defeating facism at home or abroad will change the direction of history 🙂 Mango in jail will help as well
The Europeans have been increasingly dependent upon the U.S. for defense and for market access ever since WW2. Their national demographics are mostly far worse than ours so that will continue to be the case, but even more so.
The end of cheap Russian gas will have a devastating effect on what remains of German domestic industry. The Germans will probably wind up having to build even more of their industry on U.S. soil to serve the North American market so as to be able to afford their growing population of retirees as their own working-age population rapidly dwindles. The Japanese and Koreans are doing the same for the same demographic and economic reasons.
The Europeans are out of the chest-thumping business because they no longer have much of a chest to thump.
I think they see value in it, they are just old and tired now and can’t really do it themselves. Times will, I think, stay hard for Europe in many ways even after a Ukrainian victory in the Russo-Ukraine War.