Telecom is more than internet constellations, which still have to prove their commercial viability.
Agreed that the ESA does well on earth observation for the money. And also that they’d probably be better off putting those limited dollars in human exploration toward more robotic exploration, since mostly “human exploration” is just writing checks to the US (previously Russia) for seats to the ISS. They aren’t getting much value out of that.
That said, “human and robotic exploration” was only 850M Euros in 2024 out of a total of 7.9B, and I’d guess that less than half of that is on the human side. If you’re going to spend that little, spend it on more robots. Especially cheap and plentiful ones like the private missions going up now from the US and Japan.
Still, 7.9B is kinda lame for a total budget. That’s a third of NASA. The US has a higher GDP than the EU, but it isn’t triple.
I’m aware of that. The point is that European operators like SES and Eutelsat are heavily invested in geostationary fleets, and these are very quickly going to become much less valuable, if not entirely obsolete. LEO constellations are the future, but the EU is underinvesting.
GEO has the advantage of simplicity in tracking and lower constellation numbers. I could see it continuing for uses that don’t require low latency.
It’s easier, for sure. Maybe geostationary has some future for TV, though it seems to me that TV is also dead.
But for anything else? I don’t see it. It’s bad for internet services and bad for direct-to-cell or internet-of-things (both due to latency and signal strength). Phased-array antennas were always the long pole for LEO but the costs are basically negligible now. And we have the capacity to launch the constellations now.
Orgs that figure this out will eat the lunch of ones that don’t. The indicators are only going one way.
GEO was all about it being difficult to point an antenna at a moving target. That was its only upside.
We’ve now solved that one. GEO is dead end tech. Yes, it will limp along in legacy deployments for a long time. But nothing truly new will be built on that model.
It is pretty damn amazing that a 1500-element electronically steered phased array antenna that would have been god-tier military tech a couple decades ago now costs a few hundred bucks.
And has gain values that would have needed a dish the size of a suburban patio that same couple decades ago too.
Not all European space spending goes through the European Space Agency; countries also have national space agencies–for example: France: The French space agency, CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales) ; Germany: The German Aerospace Center (DLR); United Kingdom: The UK Space Agency; Italy: The Italian Space Agency (ASI).
Good point. It looks like there’s another several billion dedicated to individual agencies–though without picking through each one it’s hard to tell exactly how much. For example, CNES has a €2.4B budget, but €1.1B of that goes to ESA.
Also, some of these don’t quite overlap with NASA. €460M of CNES goes to “defense and strategic independence”, but NASA is a civilization agency. Defense-related items would be funded separately.
In a way, yes, I suppose it is.
Heh. As far as Freudian slips go, I suppose that one wasn’t too bad. As much as I may criticize NASA on the specifics, they’re among the best products of civilization that America has to offer.
Fantastic footage from the Firefly lander:
I like how you can see that the dust kicked up at the end just follows a ballistic trajectory. On Earth, it would be there for minutes; on the Moon it falls back down in just a few seconds.
Picture of PlanetVac:
Brian
I love the high-def imagery we’re getting.
On Thursday, we’re getting another landing:
Exciting times!
I wonder how much of the revived interest in space is due to advanced imaging and telemetry that can return high-definition live video. Pictures or it didn’t happen!
Feels like cameras got short shrift for a long time. Why splurge on a camera when you can pack in another science instrument? But the fact is, it’s mostly the public that funds these things, and the public doesn’t know enough about the science to be directly interested. Whereas everyone can appreciate pretty pictures.
SpaceX understands this as well, which is why their streams are uniformly great. Maybe you can’t put an actual number on it, but getting people interested is valuable.
Yeah, my older sister who is a meteorite specialist and I have a running gag about “isotope ratios” being as uninteresting to the general public as they are interesting to planetary scientists.
A certain xkcd comes to mind (as always):
The IM-2 livestream should appear here in about 7 hours:
Two lunar landers in one week! And both privately developed to boot.
I probably won’t be awake for it, but I’m hoping to wake up to good news. Their previous lander did touch down successfully but tipped over. It still managed to conduct most of its mission. Still, they’ve fixed a bunch of things and hope this one will be a total success.
IM-2 is on the surface, and is charging, but orientation is uncertain.
In contrast to Firefly, this does not look like a “completely successful” landing.
(it should be noted that this is a more difficult landing location)
At least that is what I gather from the live stream.
Brian