ESA Q&A

• ESA Q&A by Chris Bergin on 03 Sep, 2007 15:27
• A thread to allow questions about ESA, how it's funded, what it does, and its viability for funding by partner nations.
  
  To kick this off:
  
  I've been arguing that the UK would not be paying $400m a year if we weren't part of the EU. Not specific to being in the EU, not because it's written into EU law, but that it is related. (Open to being proven wrong).
  
  As an Englishman, I also find ESA is 'off the radar' with the UK public, compared to the media NASA gets, for example. Some of this is related to "not knowing what ESA does, or what benefits we get out of ESA bar the occasional small flag on ESA hardware".
  
  This is an opportunity for such answers to be given.
• #1 by sammie on 03 Sep, 2007 16:50
• I'll add a number if points for the discussion. With a yearly budget of $400m how much publicity do you think you'll get. The MoD is going to invest close to 11bln Pounds in new aircraft carriers and it barely made the headlines overhere in Scotland. Then there is the more fundemental issue, should the government spend money to grab headlines and win over voters, or should it spend it's money for the common good, in this case remaining at that the cutting edge of research and industry? If not enough people know about's Britain's involvement in ESA or space in general, is that because of ESA or Britain?
  
  About the connection between ESA and the EU. There are links between the two organizations, as they cooperate on certain projects. However, ESA is not the EU Space Agency or something like that. ESA is intergovernmental body, thus a body created by an agreement between it's members. Whereas the EU has supra-national elements in it, a different sort of organization all together.
  
  ESA works with a re-investment agreement, which means that every penny invested in ESA should be re-invested in it's members. They way this works in practice I'm not sure. I would have to go through a couple of year reports and such to come up with the actual data on the division of work and the tender process. However the lack of shiny ESA facilities doesn't mean that UK Money is being used to keep French engineers occupied (and lets face it, that's the UK's main worry).
• #2 by Jonesy STS on 03 Sep, 2007 18:08
• I'm with Chris on this. What do we get out of ESA? It does seem like a European handshake to appease other EU related negotiations, of which the UK is always the odd one out.
• #3 by meiza on 03 Sep, 2007 18:58
• Every country feels that it's not listened to in EU negotiations and lawmaking.
• #4 by UK Shuttle Clan on 03 Sep, 2007 19:03
• Quote

  sammie - 3/9/2007  11:50 AM
  
  The MoD is going to invest close to 11bln Pounds in new aircraft carriers and it barely made the headlines overhere in Scotland.

  
  Those are uber cool Aircraft carriers, totally state of the art. Shows what we could do with some money and a space program. So question is, why not, why is the UK buying into ESA?
• #5 by Michael Z Freeman on 03 Sep, 2007 19:23

• Quote

  sammie - 3/9/2007  5:50 PM  With a yearly budget of $400m how much publicity do you think you'll get. The MoD is going to invest close to 11bln Pounds in new aircraft carriers and it barely made the headlines overhere in Scotland. Then there is the more fundemental issue, should the government spend money to grab headlines and win over voters, or should it spend it's money for the common good, in this case remaining at that the cutting edge of research and industry?

  Good point, but I think there is a fundamental difference there. Britain has been building ships since the first craft that launched onto the waters. Space flight, especially human space flight is an endeavour that has only just started happening in the last few decades, for the first time in our entire evolution. I think there should, at least, be an initiative to make sure people are properly informed of that. After all it is the hundreds of years of graft and government business that has got us to the Age of Space in the first place. Of course there are many concerns on Terra firma, many of them often more important than our fledgling space technologies. But you can't put the space missions in the same boat, so to speak.

  To address what Chris Bergin has said above, I don't think we (the UK) are deferred to NASA or America in general. As we all know, the character of the US is louder, more competitive and with people more likely to sound off about achievements. The UK is more modest with space research, happily carrying on in various academic institutions. Although, think of Beagle. We seemed to hear a lot about Colin Pillinger for some time and then things moved onto other issues. Is it just a question of differences in style ?

  I'd like to see a clear run down of what projects we are involved in though with the ESA.

  DJ Barney
  
• #6 by pierre on 03 Sep, 2007 20:34
• Quote

  Jonesy STS - 3/9/2007  8:08 PM
  
  What do we get out of ESA?

  
  You get the same thing that other ESA states get: money invested in high tech British industries, people (engineers and scientists) and patents.
  
  You simply get much less of this than France, Italy and Germany because, well, your contribution to the budget is so small (8.59% in 2005 according to Wikipedia).
  
  I live in Turin (Italy) and here the impact of ESA and ASI (the Italian Space Agency) is very noticeable: there is a number of space-related companies and a lot of money and highly qualified jobs involved (here were built all the MPLMs, Columbus, Node 2 and 3, the "manned" parts of the ATVs, Cupola, contributions to Vega and all the Ariane launchers, from 1 to 5, the IXV demonstrator and a very long list of satellites and robotic spacecrafts including contributions to high-visibility ones such as Rosetta, BepiColombo, Mars and Venus Express, Integral, Envisat and Cassini only to mention a few).
  
  So, there is a lot to gain from heavy investments in space and it's not at all a zero-sum game: ESA reinvests here the money that Italy pays to ESA, but with the expertise acquired we have been able to build and sell to NASA the three MPLMs, Harmony and Node 3.
  
  And it's not something limited to the big guys: personally I'm more-or-less an independent contractor for developing software for a small suborbital astronomy mission (no details, sorry). It's a very small thing but I hope that it will be useful to reduce a bit development time and costs for this mission and for similar ones in the future.
  
  And if highly qualified jobs and new technologies aren't enough for you, remember the (arguably) most important thing that we all get from this: knowledge about our planet, solar system and universe. In the end that's what makes us humans: our curiosity.
• #7 by Chris Bergin on 03 Sep, 2007 21:20
• Very good responses so far! This is what we need (especially UK users who don't get to know about these things, myself included).
  
  Question: Do we know the specific benefits to UK companies for the $400m we put in? I've asked BAE and Astrium UK members today and they said "nothing."
  
  Question: If the UK changed it's space policy, sticking with ESA, but increasing its contribution to say (pretend) $2 billion a year, what could this mean for the UK? Could we follow the model of Italy, which is ESA, but has an active role as an Italian program, with Vega, IXV and astronauts.
  
  Basically, it's pros and cons for ESA vs. UK program, or combination.
  
• #8 by meiza on 03 Sep, 2007 22:59
• There are programs with ESA that you can join or stay out of. For example my country is not participating in the ESA human spaceflight program. ESA has 17 members. 9 of those plus Canada are in the Aurora programme which aims to beyond LEO human spaceflight in the long term but has stuff like Mars surface probes for now.
  
  I think ESA could do a lot better job in disseminating information about what new stuff happens, and the media should follow better too. There's lots of stuff going on like Corot, and there are things in the recent past like Huygens (must be in the top ten most awesome missions of the decade at least).
• #9 by sammie on 03 Sep, 2007 23:05
• From the top of my head there is Surrey that has received the contract to build 2 Galileo test satellites (GIOVE A & GIOVE A2). Galileo is one of the few programmes where the EU and ESA actually do cooperate. Surrey Satellites also received a number of other small ESA contracts, such as small GEO study.
  
  But lets take this from the top (I had planned to write some sort of article on this, but Im swamped with my thesis now)
  
  BNSC Funding
  In the year 2005/2006, BNSC's partners spent £207 million on space programmes - about 65% of which was the UK's contribution to European Space Agency.
  ESA Funding
  All Member States* contribute to these programmes on a scale based on their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The other programmes, known as ‘optional’, are only of interest to some Member States, who are free to decide on their level of involvement.
  
  * please note, member states from ESA, not EU!
  
  From the first source, the BNSC (British National Space Centre), spend roughly 200mln Pound Sterling on space. 65% of this goes to ESA, which is about 195mln Euro per annum (unless there are seperate sources of UK Funds to ESA, that goes outside the BNSC Budget). I can't, at this point of time, explain the different between the $400mln earlier quoted.
  
  So lets bring in Wiki; as shown earlier, all Member States have pay a mandatory share, based on GDP. The UK is paying 16,93% of 667mln Euro (113mln Euro). They also contribute 5.91% to the optional programmes, which is 110mln Euro. Total contribution according to wiki is 223mln Euro. Which approaches the figue provided by the BNSC, the $400mln figure earlier quoted seems a bit over the top, unless the exchange rate has gone down a lot lately.
  
  I believe that each penny invested in the optional programmes has to be re-invested in the participating Members. Thus a country can join a project, like the UK joined ESA projects such as Cassini-Huygens, Envisat and Galileo. The larger your share in each project, the larger your return on it will be. The mandatory share of the funds the UK puts into ESA is being used for the Agency’s basic activities (studies on future projects, technology research, shared technical investments, information systems and training programmes). Any increase in the UK spending on ESA will give a 100% return of money, because only the optional share will increase, not the mandatory share...
  
  Additional info on the UK Projects: from here
  At the ESA Ministerial in December 2005, the UK subscribed to the following optional programmes: Aurora, the Earth Observation Envelope Programme-3, Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) phase 1, and Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES).
  
  and
  
  ESA operates a system of "Juste Retour" which, put simply, is that members of programmes can expect to receive back in industrial contracts an amount roughly equivalent to its contributions, less overheads.
  
  For info on the results you can check this page, EADS Astrium is included in one of the Case Studies, it seems they received a 7mln grant, which enabled them to develop hardware which became quite successful. More [/url=http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/content.aspx?nid=5913]here[/url]
• #10 by pippin on 04 Sep, 2007 09:36
• 400mil$ fits neatly with 207mil£
• #11 by Spiff on 04 Sep, 2007 09:43
• I have rarely, if ever, mingled in the several discussions on this forum about the NASA budgets and how it should be spent. This because I feel that since it is not my money (not being a US taxpayer) I do not have the right to tell any American how to spend their money. Thank you therefore Chris for this thread which seems to get some discussion going about the ESA budget. However, it's a Q&A thread, so I'll try to keep this in that style. There's always room left for discussion, and currently I don't know enough about it anyway to entitle myself to an opinion.

   So, questions.

  Does anyone have any information about how the ESA budget is/has been built up between the several memberstates? Can it be found in ESA yearly reports, and if so, where can they be found?

  Same question about how this budget is subsequently spent between memberstates?

  The EU (Yes I know, that is not ESA) has become almost twice as big in the past 4 years with a lot of eastern european countries joining. Are they (planning to be) members of ESA as well? If so, how much will that increase ESA budget and what opportunities will that bring?

  Well, that's quite a bit of questions as a start. And they're probably not all that easy to answer. Personally I don't even know how much my own country (the Netherlands) contributes to ESA budget and to which programs it contributes. We do have THE most state of the art research facility here, (ESTEC) and, considering the previous 'penny for penny' strategy I suppose that means that we also supply quite a bit of budget. But I honestly don't know.

  Spiff

  edit: somehow my layout is being nasty today. Sorry if it looks bad... :S

   

• #12 by 02hurnella on 04 Sep, 2007 10:03
• Take a look at the ESA's page on wikipedia. Here, it shows budget and what countries are involved
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency
  
  The ESA is a bit smaller than the EU. It doesn't include lots of eastern nations. However it does have Norway and switzerland, which aren't in the EU. They are very careful to balance contributions with benefits. Until recently it was felt that the UK was getting too much back. (we are the leading nation on EXOmars. I really hope it works!
  
  
• #13 by sammie on 04 Sep, 2007 11:52
• Quote

  400mil$ fits neatly with 207mil£

  But not all of those 207mln pounds get spend on ESA, 65% does. Which is $270mln per annum
  
• #14 by Felix on 04 Sep, 2007 17:28

• "The UK space industry employs approximately 16,200 staff and generated a turnover of £4.8 billion in 2004/05, an 8% rise on 2003/04. The downstream sector dominates the industry with a turnover of £4.1 billion, while the upstream sector has increased to £723m." (source )
   

  List of space companies in the UK
  http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/content.aspx?nid=5913

  Size and Health of the UK Space Industry 2006
  http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/content.aspx?nid=6007

  UK Space Activities 2007
  Space Activities is the British National Space Centre’s annual report. It lays out what the UK has achieved in the past 12 months and what is planned for the coming year.
  http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/content.aspx?nid=7077

  
  more news and publications about UK in space
  http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/default.aspx?nid=6987

• #15 by David BAE on 04 Sep, 2007 17:39
• ESA's benefit to UK space industry is minimul at best. Oh for the days of British Aerospace and the options we could have taken forward, before the old Conservative government changed all that.
• #16 by Michael Z Freeman on 04 Sep, 2007 21:30

• Q. Are there any plans for the ESA, or any member states of the ESA, to broadcast something like NASA TV on the web ? There is already some kind of satellite broadcast which I hav'nt seen, although it can be downloaded . ESA also do audio and video Podcasts .

  Q. What training and career issues should I be considering for working in the ESA ? Another language apart from my English ? Are they only looking for Scientists and technicians ?

• #17 by CentEur on 05 Sep, 2007 07:15
• Quote

  Spiff - 4/9/2007  11:43 AM
  
  The EU (Yes I know, that is not ESA) has become almost twice as big in the past 4 years with a lot of eastern european countries joining. Are they (planning to be) members of ESA as well? If so, how much will that increase ESA budget and what opportunities will that bring?

  
  We (Czech Rep. Hungary, Poland and Romania) are on the road to full membership, currently engaged through 5-year PECS (Plan for European Cooperating State). I wouldn't expect noticeable changes even with full membership. We're simply too poor today. Also the level of interest in space is very low (in Poland). Hope it gets better once EuroSoyuz starts flying.  
• #18 by pippin on 05 Sep, 2007 07:41
• Quote

  sammie - 4/9/2007  1:52 PM
  
  

  Quote

  400mil$ fits neatly with 207mil£

  But not all of those 207mln pounds get spend on ESA, 65% does. Which is $270mln per annum
  

  
  I understand. But I don't know what Chris' source for the 400mil.$ figure was. If it turns out to be British press....
  Sounds like one of those "simplifications" to me. "What was the space budget? Aren't we doing just ESA stuff? So that's 400mil.$ for ESA"
• #19 by Spiff on 05 Sep, 2007 09:14
• O2hurnella and Centeur. Thanks for your answers. I'm happy to see that the new EU memberstates are also trying to get involved, even if it is a slow process.
  
  Also, good overview of the different budgets in different countries. (Even if it's Wikipedia, and therefore most likely not 100% checked)
  I was surprised to see that the UK is actually one of the larger contributors.
  
  Another question. The budgets are divided in mandatory and optional contribution. I can understand the optional part where each country decides which projects it wishes to support and probably gets there contribution back reasonably well in the form of the money flowing back in local industry. (If not, the responsible politicians will probably not contribute.) However, I don't understand how the mandatory contribution is built up. There are obvious differences in contribution between big and small countries, but how is this decided? It is 'mandatory' which implies that the country has only limited influence over the money it 'must' pay to ESA. In this, the UK is the second largest contributor (more than France!) so I can understand the british wanting to see something back for their money.