'How space science adapted to ESA' - Guest contribution
By David Southwood , Physics Department, Imperial College, London
The European Space Agency (ESA) that emerged from a series of intergovernmental conferences between 1970 and 1975 was to be effectively a 'full service' civil space agency. ESA not only replaced the recently defunct ELDO and was charged to develop civil space applications, such as telecommunications, human spaceflight, as well as observation of Earth, it also had to absorb ESRO and continue its ongoing programme of space science. However, as the expansion was not matched with proportionate budgetary growth; traditional space science found itself under threat.
The first years of the space age
The space age had started under the auspices of a global scientific effort, the International Geophysical Year in 1957. However, with the Cold War at its height, the capacity to put spacecraft in orbit also had major geopolitical implications. It demonstrated not too subtly that a country that had launched a satellite could build intercontinental ballistic missiles. Indeed, the fact that the Soviet Union first launched a spacecraft produced horror in the US public. The Democratic candidate in the 1960 American presidential election, John F. Kennedy Jr, won election in part by blaming the preceding Republican administration for a 'missile gap' between the USSR and USA. Although the gap is now regarded as illusory, not only did Kennedy build up US ICBM stocks but also he made the declaration in 1963 that the US would land humans on the Moon, a race the US could win and that was to be achieved only six years later.
Moon landings or building world-beating stocks of missiles were not important or attainable for Western European governments but access to space became increasingly interesting. In the early 1960s, a launcher development organisation was set up, European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO). In parallel, a space science organisation, the European Space Research Organisation, ESRO, was formed. ESRO was modelled on CERN, the joint European nuclear physics research centre, with a specific goal of facilitating European scientific research in space. ESRO adopted the familiar idea from CERN of subscription proportional to national GDP (gross domestic product). It was also created with the notion of distribution of work in national industry proportional to subscription (geographic return). The first ESRO science director, Reimar Lüst, introduced another important principle, namely that ESRO itself should concentrate on providing the spacecraft and operations whilst instrumentation would be built in primarily in scientific and technical institutions, universities, research laboratories, etc. in the Member States. This step meant a lot of influence over programmatic content would remain outside the organisation itself.
Despite these joint European developments, several European nations had already taken advantage of an American offer made through the ICSU COSPAR (International Council of Scientific Unions Committee for Space Research) in 1959. This was the announcement that the US, through its new space agency NASA, was open to cooperation with foreign nations to fly space science experiments. Canada, Italy and the United Kingdom accepted with alacrity and by the mid-1960s several European nations were collaborating with the US space programme in space science. Separately, ten nations were collaborating in ESRO.
Politics in the early 1970s
By the end of the 1960s, there was increasing awareness in Europe that having space activities limited to space science and launch systems was inadequate. There were important potentially economically significant uses of space for applications or services, such as weather satellites and telecommunications. Moreover, a hiatus in the US human space programme had led to proposals for Europe perhaps collaborating with the US in human-tended space laboratories in low Earth orbit. Lastly, in 1970 after repeated failures of the Europa launcher, Italy and UK withdrew from ELDO and the launcher organisation folded. Negotiations then began which ultimately were to lead to the European Space Agency.
The political background was difficult. The mid-70s were a politically febrile time. 1974 was a nadir. In the UK, the Edward Heath government had been brought down after imposing a nationwide three-day working week and rotating power cuts caused by striking coal miners. In France, President Pompidou had died in office and the election of his successor had been by the narrowest right-left margin ever. In West Germany, Chancellor Brandt had resigned when one of his close aides was revealed as an East German spy. Lastly, in the USA, President Nixon had resigned to avoid being impeached once his early knowledge of the Watergate criminal break-in became clear.
The new questions
Ironically, it was the earlier actions of Nixon in establishing NASA’s direction post-Apollo and constraining some of its ambitions that created some of the pressures for rethinking space in Europe. Nixon did a lot to ease the Cold War; not only had he visited China but he also used space to improve US-USSR relations and the Apollo-Soyuz link up in space had grabbed worldwide attention. However, his post-Apollo programme had also led to the first US space station, Skylab, crewed by astronauts. This programme was coming to an end in 1974 but it, as well as Apollo-Soyuz collaboration between the Soviet Union and the USA had shown astronauts in a different light. The idea of astronauts (or cosmonauts) working together in space stations near Earth rather than exploring far away on the Moon or beyond led to questions as to how there could be Western Europeans working in space. By the end of the 1970s the Soviet space programme was flying cosmonauts from Eastern bloc countries. It was clear to many that Western Europe should find a way to undertake a human spaceflight programme.
The further fundamental issue for European countries was launchers. Developing launchers and their necessary ground infrastructure was expensive; there was much appeal in sharing the burden with other European countries. However, the ELDO initiative had manifestly not been successful. In the end, the Americans provided the impetus for progress but in this case in a rather negative way.
Telecommunications was already seen as an important emerging application for space. Germany and France had started. The loss of any immediate prospect of a European launcher caused a problem for the two experimental telecom satellites under development in the joint Franco-German 'Symphonie' programme. The failure of the ELDO launcher programme meant that an American launch system had to be used. However, the US authorities imposed a restrictive condition forbidding any subsequent commercial use of the Symphonie spacecraft.
The Symphonie programme was a success but the limitations imposed by the US meant that most agreed Europe would have to have its own launch system. It was already becoming clear that space telecommunications would be increasingly significant space application for both future civil and military purposes. Developing national commercial space telecommunication systems would require European technical R&D specific to the space context.
There was a growing recognition that not only would Europe need to develop its own weather satellites but also other forms of Earth observation could be of increasing practical interest. Potential applications might even potentially have commercial use as well as military or civil institutional interest.
Lastly, it was also evident that the space science done so far in ESRO was largely in solar terrestrial physics and high energy astrophysics. It was becoming clear that there were not only new areas astronomy and planetary science that European scientists wished to do but also Earth science done from space was a discipline offering countless possibilities. Indeed, there were voices that European space science had been in the hands of the founding generation too long. The official history of ESA (by Krige et al. p39) writing about the ESRO Launch Programme Advisory Committee and the Science Advisory Committee describes the situation bluntly: 'The wish of the DG and the Executive to restrict the autonomy of the LPAC/SAC reflected a growing dissatisfaction, openly expressed by some, that the experts on it were a small clique of mandarins, conservative in approach, out of touch with the new, younger generation of space scientists, and closed to the technological and scientific opportunities expected in the 1980s. Ironically, as we shall see subsequently, in the final stages of the creation of ESA, those 'mandarins' (three of whom are shown in Figure 1) were to take one last important action whose effect has lasted until today.
The European Space Conferences
The end of ELDO in 1970 and the numerous other pressures for change given above led to a series of intergovernmental European space conferences to construct the future. The conferences were difficult as there was not a common picture of what the future should be.
By 1973 major steps had been taken about cooperation with NASA on human spaceflight. It was clear how the first European astronauts might fly; NASA agreed to collaborate in the flight of a European space module, Spacelab, as an element of its new Space Shuttle programme.
Other new programmes were gestating but a new question remained as to how the European states would contribute to pay for them. The previously established notion of Member State subscription being proportional to GDP was a sticking point in the development of the new European space organisation. Different countries had different priorities, and everyone claimed to have no funds to spare. The political log-jam was broken by the intervention of the British minister Michael Heseltine. He put forward what has become the idea of the optional programme. Nations would decide at the start of new programmes how much they would contribute and expect proportional industrial work in return. Heseltine’s idea was accepted and 50 years on optional programmes form the basis for how ESA works in all programmes except the Science Programme and the General Budget. In ESA, Ministerial Councils often take the form of a trading floor where participation in programmes is shaped by deals between Member States to bring the budgets together.
It was also agreed that the first ESA Director General would be British: Roy Gibson. He chose the name of the post, firmly rejecting a proposal that he be 'Secretary General'. ESA would have been a very different organisation had that proposal been successful.
The outlines of the new agency were coming into place before the future of space science received serious consideration. Only in early 1975 did attention turn to the science programme of the new agency. It was then that the scientific 'old guard', the senior scientists or 'mandarins' mentioned before, made their critical contribution. These men (they were all men) had served, often through membership of the powerful ESRO Launch Programme Advisory Committee and/or in its Science Advisory Committee.
In 1974, perhaps from foresight of what would be coming, they had put in place the Provisional Space Science Board for Europe (PSSBE). Its name implied it was conceived as a European counterpart to the US National Academy of Science Space Studies Board (SSB). However, that body came under the US National Academy of Sciences and had a nationally defined role of providing external critique of NASA in the interests of science. An obvious problem was that the PSSBE had no comparable auspices to the US institution. Indeed, there was no European institution with the status of the US Academy.
However, there were moves afoot elsewhere. The national scientific research councils across Europe had come together to form the European Science Foundation (ESF) in November 1974. Possibly newly emboldened by the accession of UK along with Denmark and Ireland to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, the European Commission, the EEC’s administrative body, had put a resolution to the European Council for civil research programmes to be coordinated in support of the sectoral policies of the Community. Ideas were abroad that national programmes would be integrated and contribute to the development of a common policy on science and technology. The ESF had an explicit goal of providing an external perspective on pan-European activities related to science. I always saw its formation as a direct reaction to the European Commission proposals (which, of course, eventually led into the Framework and Horizon programmes).
Quite naturally, the PSSBE was absorbed into the ESF in November of that critical year, 1974 and adopted the new name of the ESF, the European Space Science Committee (ESSC). Its first chair was Sir Harrie Massey, who had not only played a unique role in initiating space science in UK but also an important part in the setting up of ESRO. The ESSC membership was made up of many of the senior space scientists from the ESRO programme. These people knew how to pull political ropes in their respective national systems as would be soon seen.
In late February 1975, conference preparing ESA received a proposal from France to place responsibility for the ESA space science programme to be placed directly with at the level of the ESA Council. Harry Atkinson had been representing science in the UK delegation from the beginning of negotiations four years earlier. He had seen Heseltine’s introduction of the idea of the optional programme as a means to get a multi-programme agency to work but he saw the implications. The political risk of the French proposal was clear to Harry. Being administered by the Council directly would likely leave the science programme with little or no scientific authority and autonomy in the hands of scientists. It would almost certainly become a political pawn used to balance package deals that would naturally arise in setting up the new optional programmes. Even the mandatory status it had in ESRO might be lost. He voted against the proposal on the grounds for the need for the independence of science. He found the UK was in a minority of one.
Deeply concerned, he contacted UK scientists whom he knew to be members of the ESSC. The other ESSC members were rapidly contacted, asked to communicate at highest national level possible. By 6 March 1975, less than two weeks after the vote, a resolution signed by all except the French member of the ESSC group was presented in the name of the ESSC. Overall, sufficient national and international political pressure was raised in the nations around the table that, in April at the next formal preparatory meeting, the previous vote outcome was reversed. The new agency would have a space science programme run by a Science Programme Committee (SPC) under the Council. Moreover, the budget would remain determined by GDP contribution, as in ESRO. The arrangements still hold today. Because of its mandatory nature the ESA Science Programme is indeed used in maintaining or developing industrial balance for ESA for the wider ESA programme overall. However, this is done fully under the control of the ESA Science Director.
The above story is recounted in the oral history interview that Atkinson made for the ESA Oral History Project. Atkinson went on to represent UK at ESA Council and to become Vice-chair of ESA Council in 1981 and Chair 1984/87. I also heard the story close to the time from my senior colleague at Imperial, Harry Elliot, a member of ESSC. Although thinking of myself as a 'young Turk' at the time, I realised that the old guard are needed to act in extremis.
The ESSC continues to today and normally attends ESA Ministerial Councils with observer status. Its critical actions in 1975 are not the end of its contribution to the development of space science in the context of ESA as we shall see later.
The early years of Science in ESA and the need for recovery
Although the Science Programme of the new agency had survived with the science community expecting to have the programme under the control of a Director with control over the planning and the content of the programme. However, the first challenge to address was that the budget available to continue the programme begun with the ESRO programme had been severely reduced despite an overall increase in spending on space in the new multi-purpose space agency. Moreover, there were new demands; many administrators felt that the new programme Spacelab, which would provide the basis for the new European astronaut corps, should have support drawn from the science budget. The prospective budget left for the continuation of the ESRO programme was verging on 50% of the budget of ESRO. Moreover, there were already pressures form some quarters for space science to include Earth science, i.e. science looking down on Earth rather than out into the cosmos.
The limited budget meant that it looked as if the major part of the programme would need be in a frame of international cooperation, the USA being the most likely partner. Several major programmes in this frame were IUE (International Ultraviolet Explorer), Hubble Space Telescope, ISEE (International Sun-Earth Explorers), Ulysses (International Solar Polar Mission). Indeed, Europe’s first deep-space mission, Giotto, to encounter Comet Halley had begun as a joint mission with the US. However, after the US unilaterally cancelled their mission, after much controversy, ESA decided to go ahead with its own mission.
If the experience with comet Halley had not been enough, by 1981 it became very clear that relying on long-term cooperation with the USA was risky. In early 1981, the incoming US administration of President Reagan underlined the point. A further cooperative mission, the International Solar Polar Mission, a two spacecraft mission to fly over the solar poles was cancelled. This was a major blow to the ESA Science Programme. In Europe it provoked a crisis with an effect almost as formative as the earlier Symphonie crisis; the idea of depending on the US partners for high priority activities was under severe challenge. In the end, a much-reduced ESA-led mission, renamed Ulysses, was the outcome.
Expanding ESA programme content: Planetary science cooperation with the USA
However, the crisis of Ulysses was still only part of the problems. By the early 1980s the community interested in the ESA Science Programme was in turmoil over the shape of the programme. There was another consideration. There was a growing groundswell of opinion in the European science community itself that the European programme had concentrated on had concentrated too much on solar terrestrial science and X-ray and UV astronomy. The demand for consideration of wider science areas coupled with demands to support the large new projects had been introduced in the wider ESA programme, such as the human spaceflight programme, Spacelab, was creating major concern.
It did not help that spectacular results were appearing in the USA in planetary science. The US programme had had the enormously successful Voyager spacecraft flybys of the giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, as the new decade began. Venus had been orbited in 1978 and work had begun on a NASA Jupiter orbiter to be called Galileo. Further pressure came from, new areas in space astronomy emerging. In conjunction with Netherlands and UK, NASA was in the final stages of developing IRAS, an infrared astronomical whole sky survey. ESA could not ignore the new possibilities in both Solar System or space astronomy.
Western European scientists were also becoming increasingly aware of Soviet robotic exploration of Venus and Mars. Moreover, the Soviet Vega mission to both Venus and comet Halley would be coordinated with the ESA Giotto mission as well as with two Japanese Halley probes.
Planetary science was a personal concern of mine at this time. It was in this discipline that the ESSC committee took a further important step to nurture space science development in Europe. In 1979, a Swiss planetary scientist, Johannes Geiss, who had built the solar wind experiment deployed on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, became chair of ESSC in succession to Massey. He came in with a mission. Frustrated by the lack of attention to planetary science in Europe, he set about change. I was disconcerted when, probably in 1981, such a senior scientist turned up at my office at Imperial College. I suppose he chose to visit me as I was the only foreign co-I in the NASA Galileo Jupiter Orbiter magnetometer team but he didn’t say. I don’t know who else he visited but he made it clear he had a plan. He wanted to urge the need for action to get planetary science in Europe its due. Geiss, whom I got to know well later, was very persistent. He wanted to use his already strong links with the American system. His strategy was to exploit the link between US SSB and ESSC and to arrange a joint SSB-ESSC activity to look at potential joint European-US planetary missions.
The idea did not go down well in certain quarters. It was commonly held that planetary exploration was too expensive for Europe. Indeed, after my appointment to one of the study groups, I learnt from UK Research Council staff that the then chair of the Council had stepped in to veto my travel request on these grounds. Happily, having recently returned from working in the USA, I found funds from American sources to support me.
Even inside ESA there was concern about Geiss’s initiative. I had a close ex-colleague and friend, George Haskell who was in charge of ESA Solar System mission planning. At the time he made clear to me his misgivings about the joint ESSC-SSB activity which he saw undermining the processes of the new ESA. I was appointed to a sub-group looking at Outer Planet options. The group focused immediately on a Saturn orbiter and Titan probe (SOTP). Some US members of the group initially proposed direct rerun of the planned Galileo orbiter and probe. The Europeans objected pointing out that there should be a specific European responsibility for developing a major mission element. The probe was the obvious choice. The seeds for cooperation had been sown. By the turn of the decade, the mission would be proposed separately to both ESA and NASA programmes, have been accepted and development was beginning on both sides of the Atlantic. Just over 15 years later, on 14 January 2005, the ESA-provided Huygens probe landed successfully on Titan. Huygens remains the most distant standing object of our civilisation.
On the US-provided Cassini spacecraft, there were two European instruments. One was the spacecraft magnetometer whose building and delivery I led. It went on operating until Cassini plunged into the Saturn atmosphere in 2017. By the time of Cassini-Huygens arrival at Saturn on 30 June 2004 I had become Science Director at ESA and I found myself in charge of the Huygens Titan landing. With Saturn arrival I could not remain magnetometer PI and that day Michele Dougherty became my successor. Our instrument was to make perhaps the most remarkable discovery of the mission in the next year, that the tiny moon Enceladus had geysers and an internal ocean.
The discovery of the Enceladus geysers and the successful landing of Huygens on Titan alone mean there is no doubt of the historic impact of the European element of Cassini-Huygens. All that is owed to the critical catalytic role of Johannes Geiss and the ESSC more than 20 years before.
Another SSB-ESSC group looked at exploration of small bodies in the Solar System. Collaborations seeded in that study could be seen as ultimately (after many vicissitudes) bearing fruit with the ESA Rosetta cometary mission.
The ESA Horizon 2000 plan
Talk about what Europe ought to be doing and producing grand plans was fine but where were the funds? In 1983, a new ESA Science Director had been appointed, Roger Bonnet. Bonnet, who came from a radical family background and had been a soixante-huitard, knew change had to come for the programme he had inherited. Action was necessary. By the end of that year, he had put together scientists from across Europe to come up with a long-term plan for European space science covering all disciplines. It was the first long-term science programme in ESA and was called 'Horizon 2000' (or H2000) and incorporated a mix of large, medium and small missions. The large missions would be called Cornerstones and the four proposed would stake out Europe’s claim to be doing space science across the board. Bonnet’s introduction of the idea of a long-term plan and the need for a balanced programme between disciplines, revolutionary at the time, underpins the ESA Science Programme today.
The plan was conceived against the notion that the ESA Space Science budget needed to be returned at least to ESRO expenditure levels. The plan galvanised the European space science community and the budget rose slowly over a decade.
The Titan probe conceived through the ESSC-NAS activity became the first H2000 medium mission, the third Cornerstone following up the probe to comet Halley in 1986, was the Rosetta comet orbiter and lander. Moreover, as the budget grew, ESA established its dominance in infrared astronomy with not only ISO (Infrared Space Observatory, launched in 1995) but also the fourth H2000 Cornerstone, Herschel.
In parallel with the battle to bring in the H2000 the success of interagency coordination with for comet Halley led to other interest in closer cooperation with the Soviet Union. Although Bonnet played an important part, the ESSC also set about building bridges elsewhere in what was still a divided Europe. I have personal evidence of this as in 1989 when the ESSC met in London. Roger Bonnet was in attendance with not only the NASA Associate Administrator for Science Len Fisk, but also the new head of the Russian space science programme Albert Galeev. I invited them to my house for dinner one evening; the next day my teenage son got into a major argument at school when nobody believed he had been talking to the head of European, American and Russian space science programmes the evening before.
By the mid-1980s, the arrival of the new Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev made it possible to much improve space cooperation between the West and the USSR. By the 1990s, many western European scientists had entered into cooperation with the Russian Mars programme. The culmination was the Mars '96 mission heavily instrumented by Western European instrumentation, which sadly was lost not long after launch. A major consequence of the big instrumentation development was that the Mars Express mission was shoe-horned into the ESA programme with a payload based on many of the western instruments developed for Mars '96. The results from those Mars Express instruments went on to have a big impact on comprehension of martian history and, consequently, on the subsequent exploration of Mars.
Earth observation and post-Envisat plan
In the early 1990s, opportunities were expanding for Earth science from space in Europe. The launch of the ESA ERS-1 (European Remote-sensing Satellite) spacecraft in 1991 marked ESA’s first step in Earth observation beyond the meteorological spacecraft (Meteosats) that had been built and launched since the late 1970s, which were operated by Eumetsat (the European Organisation for Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites). A second Earth observation spacecraft was already in development ERS-2 (to be launched in 1995) and beyond that early preparation was under way for a large programme that eventually would create the mammoth Envisat mission (launched in 2002).
Once again initial pressure came from outside ESA. In the early 1990s ESSC formed a subgroup EEOP (European Earth Observation Panel) whose first action was to produce a document, A Strategy for Earth Observation from Space, published in 1992 which promoted the importance of recognising the distinction between use of EO in space for science and applications. Indeed, it was suggested that the science part of the programme should be funded by a mandatory subscription proportional to member state GDP like space science was.
The notion of separation of science and applications (and eventually provision of services) did not fit well with all schools of thought inside ESA. The success of the ERS satellites had led to the development by ESA of the massive Envisat spacecraft with instruments covering multiple disciplines. he spacecraft was carried on a large spacecraft bus known as the Polar Platform. Many believed that a series of spacecraft using the standard Polar Platform large bus with its multi-instrument capability should be the way ahead for European Earth observation. Indeed, it was even envisaged in some quarters that astronauts might be sent to changeover instruments on long-serving polar platforms.
Some scientists could see there was a problem. Multi-discipline missions like Envisat were a terrific way to demonstrate principles and capabilities. However, all instruments and the disciplines they represented were flying on the same orbit. In future, it was clear that if particular techniques were to evolve from science to first demonstration of applications and ultimately to provision of services tuned to user requirements, the orbit needed to be part of the custom design.
I had become aware of the arguments in the mid-1990s but then in 1997 I joined ESA with a specific responsibility to design the ESA Earth Observation (EO) programme to follow Envisat. In my own research group at Imperial, some of my colleagues had explained how central the selection of the orbit was for any given use. Accordingly, I joined ESA with a bias against large multi-instrument spacecraft in the long term. ERS had, and Envisat would, demonstrate capabilities across disciplines and ultimately provision of services from space. These ideas led naturally to the separation of pure science from applications. As one had already seen with meteorology from space and the transfer from ESA to Eumetsat for the provision of services and applications. With the much wider range of disciplines outside meteorology we proposed the ESA Earth Explorer science-driven programme but then with applications to be covered in a partnership with EU, now called the Copernicus programme. Once again, the ESSC played its part having both seeded and promoted the separation of science and applications as early as 1992. Bonnet and I and our staff in ESA picked up this idea and we were subsequently very grateful for the support from ESSC. Its legacy has been long-term as the current European EO programme as illustrated in the Figure 5 is based on the division between science and applications with relatively small purpose-directed spacecraft.
Although I am fairly sure I have made useful scientific contributions in a variety of space activities, getting the architecture for the post-Envisat programme designed, agreed and in place is probably the most important thing that I have done. ESSC should share credit.
This year, as ESA celebrates its 50th anniversary, Europeans can be proud that their overall EO space programme is second to none worldwide currently and space science is probably second only due to its more limited budget. Nonetheless, everyone involved in European space needs to be mindful of how the scientific elements of its programme, sometimes seeming immutable, need to proper funding to evolve with changing science but also can require ESA to respond to the outside community as represented by science advocacy groups like the ESSC.
David Southwood joined ESA in 1997 from Imperial College London becoming Head of Earth Observation Strategy. He introduced a programme of focused ESA Earth Observation science missions and operational spacecraft (for EU Copernicus, Eumetsat and others) still in place today. In 2001, he became Science Director at ESA (responsible for building and operating multiple ESA spacecraft and space telescopes). Retiring in 2011, he became a member then Chair of UK Space Agency Steering Board. He remains today an advisor to the UK ESA Council delegation, professor at Imperial College and chair of London Institute of Space Policy and Law.