Yet another #Artemis II article (from a French press agency, no less) ignoring that propulsion, power, & life support to the Orion capsule are provided by ESA’s European Service Module.
Built in Bremen by Airbus, with parts from all over Europe, e.g. solar wings made in Leiden.
Also no mention of the fact that the ESM’s for the Moon-landing Artemis IV & V missions are to be supplied as part of ESA’s contribution to the Lunar Gateway.
Which NASA cancelled last week.
The ESM’s for Artemis I, II, III, & VI (if there ever is a VI if SLS is also cancelled) are provided by ESA as part of the barter for continued access to the ISS by European astronauts.
But ESM-4 & 5 are explicitly linked to Gateway, as are many other European-provided modules already under development, & which is now dead.
The trade also included seats on Artemis for European astronauts.
More on the ESM here:
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Orion/European_Service_Module
To be clear, yes, the article is in a British newspaper, @guardian, but is directly sourced from @AFP.
Not that the articles written by the Guardian’s own journalists are necessarily any better, mind you:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/02/artemis-ii-nasa-moon-launch-american-moment
And this is no UK anti-Europe bias; same across most Euro-media.
Some are doing better though, & I know the BBC are doing a piece today about the key role being played by the ESM, & ESA themselves are of course talking up the ESM.
All of which begs the question of why this is.
Perhaps it’s a combination of media laziness, elisions in the material being issued by NASA, and the general view that only NASA does space anyway (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary).
Or is there perhaps a lack of interest from the European public in Artemis, not least given the broad rejection of the current US government & its ugly imperialism, much of which manifests itself in anti-European rhetoric & action?
And of course it’s entirely possible (personally, I think likely) that the wider European public isn’t especially interested in human spaceflight.
At least not in the way that superpowers like the US & China are, where it’s part of soft power propaganda & national myth-making.
After all, there are many other priorities on this planet, arguably more pressing than going to the Moon, such as climate change, security, & resource management, areas where space also plays a critical role though.
These are issues that ESA will have to carefully & honestly examine with its Member States in the coming months, as they try to come up with a strategy for human spaceflight that takes into account its deep current dependence on an increasingly unreliable partner.
Do European governments & the European public believe that an independent human spaceflight capability is desirable & affordable?
IMO, it’s perfectly ok if the answer to that is no. But the current model appears very broken.
@markmccaughrean I think the Ariane 64 Block 2 will have the payload to launch a reasonable two-person capsule on top of an ESM to the ISS? But I imagine they couldn't be kept in storage long enough to both develop the capsule and crew rate the rocket.
So nothing short or medium term by that route, hm.
@pauldrye There was Hermes for Ariane 5 & more recent efforts within ESA to get the Member States to agree to an independent human crew vehicle for Ariane 6, with Samantha Cristoferetti playing a big role.
But it didn’t go anywhere in the end, perhaps underlining my point about there continuing to be less appetite / desire / need for Europe to be autonomous in this regard.
Space bubbleers struggle to accept this, of course, saying it reflects poorly on Europe. But does it really?
Here's some food for thought: Where are the scientific publications that are coming out of the actual crewed space flights?
When you look at robotic missions (deep space probes, space telescopes, research satellites, etc.) it's easy enough to find your paper alerts being flooded with published results. There's a also a lot of publications on the engineering side.
But when it comes to crewed space flight? There's a lot less there. We're talking of several OOM discrepancy.
@datenwolf One of my jobs at ESA was to give regular updates to our various committees & boards on scientific results from both the robotic missions & the human spaceflight programme.
That there’s a lot of material from the former goes without saying, but there is plenty from the latter too. That said it tends to be less “cosmically awesome”, relating to human & plant biology, materials science, fundamental physics, etc., less immediately exciting than stars, planets, & galaxies.
@datenwolf It also tends to be a lot more “bitty”, coming in small chunks as experiments are modified & upgraded over time. It’s also often a bit buried in wider studies of which the spaceflight experiments are just part.
Of course, I’m deliberately avoiding saying whether the cost-science benefit ratio is worth it compared to robotic missions, but arguably the two pots of money aren’t really fungible. Science is a by-product of other human spaceflight, not the primary goal.
I'm well aware of the experiments that are done on the ISS (or back in the day on the STS and Mir). Heck, a couple of years ago some hardware for a medical study went up to the ISS what was in part built (or rather modified from the commercial system) by colleagues of me (optical coherence tomography to investigate the eyesight problems astronauts develop in microgravity).
1/
What's puzzling to me is, that so little of what's done on the ISS ends up being discussed during lunch, or over the post seminar pizza. Whereas so much other research, often in very far removed fields tends to be brought up.
It's a quite remarkable situation: Crewed space flight is a very "popular" topic; almost everyone in the 1st and 2nd world knows about it and that "a lot of science" is happening there.
But among my earthbound researcher peers it's discussed very little.
@datenwolf I agree, & little of the science done there is covered by media either, hence burying it from the public radar screen too. Possibly because in part it’s visually unexciting, just humans & boxes of gear.
There’s also an element of truth in that it’s a bit of an insider club, with the same groups getting experiments approved all the time, partly because they already know the ropes & partly because they then sit on the committees deciding future strategy & experiments.
@datenwolf And that you get weird outliers like AMS-02, a hugely expensive piece of kit that made its way to the ISS despite not being highly-ranked in peer review, despite huge technical problems during test which led to the cryomagnet being dumped, making the experiment less sensitive, & despite needing congressional approval for a whole extra shuttle flight to get it there.
The power of a Nobel prize winner very adept at playing politics, to be sure, but good for science?
@markmccaughrean Quite a lot of people used to be really excited about manned space exploration, myself being one of them, but current events have made us almost indifferent to it. To refer to a professional author's take:
@Lemmus I have a lot of time for Charlie & his perspective, & suspect that it’s widely shared even among tech & science folk.
Which is a problem for NASA, inasmuch as the association between the tropes of human destiny in space & fascism are probably even stronger now in the public eye than it was in Von Braun’s heyday.
But perhaps even more so for ESA, if the next move is to try to persuade people that an independent human spaceflight programme is the way forward.
@Lemmus @markmccaughrean I'm still genuinely surprised that it happened. When Trump started talking about it my immediate response was "Bullshit, he's distracting people from important things."
I never thought he was serious.
@birchbirch The problem with that is that people are often fine with glorious, exciting endeavours when the bill is footed by someone else.
Ask your golf friends whether they’d be willing to pay an extra few percent income tax to fund an independent European human spaceflight programme & a wider boost to education, universities, government R&D, tech incubation, & science needed to support, justify, & benefit from such a programme.
I suspect you know the answer already 😛
@birchbirch While I know that it’s de rigueur to knock the government (which leads to ugly populists like the Tangerine Tyrant getting into power), my sense is that European govts are following the lead of the public on this, not vice versa, i.e. that the taxpayers don’t wish to put too much money into big vanity endeavours like human spaceflight.
After all, didn’t the Tories propose a fully UK Crew Dragon flight, but to be paid privately, not by the govt? Shades of Project Juno.
@markmccaughrean I think it's a lot easier: If one news agency, like AFP or dpa, get's it "wrong" or, to use a less loaded term, this certain way, outlets will cite them and it spreads quickly, because press is pretty accustomed to take the material and publish it with just a few adaptations. And Guardian's own guy lives in Florida, so he won't have a lot of contact to ESA staff, or would he?
Yeah, it's lazy af.
@markmccaughrean @guardian @AFP
I haven't read the english AFP article, but I can tell you that BFM (main tv news) invited someone who spoke long about ESA's work on this mission (I can't remember his name but I'll try to find the video).
There's also other articles like the one from RFI (RAdio France Internationale), interview with Philippe Berthe :
Artemis II: «Sans le Module de service européen, la mission est impossible»
https://www.rfi.fr/fr/science/20260331-artemis-ii-sans-le-module-de-service-europ%C3%A9en-la-mission-est-impossible
Au sein de l'Agence spatiale européenne (ESA), Philippe Berthe est responsable de la coordination sur l'ESM, le Module de service européen du vaisseau spatial Orion. À ce titre, comme pour Artemis I en 2022, il sera membre de la « Mission Management Team » à Cap Canaveral puis Houston sur le deuxième vol du programme, le premier habité vers la Lune depuis plus d'un demi-siècle. Entretien.
@hadon Oh, there certainly has been some coverage of the European involvement in Artemis, & I also saw a piece of Dutch TV where the fact that the solar wings were made in Leiden was mentioned.
I’ve been asked to do media around Artemis & have largely turned it down, because I have felt very conflicted about not wanting to give any succour to the current US govt. Missed opportunities to discuss the ESM as a result, of course.
And overall, ESA’s part is just lost in the noise of US flag-waving.
But you are right, maybe written mainstream media hasn't said it enough. So, I'm going to share more articles on the subject. This is something about we Europeans should be proud. We need to know more about our own capabilities and strength.
NASAs Space Launch System rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, carrying four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis II mission. This historic launch marks the first crewed flight of the Artemis programme and the first time humans are travelling towards the Moon in over 50 years., , , , Europe will be providing the power that makes the journey possible thanks to ESAs European Service Module, the propulsion heart of the Orion spacecraft. The module su...
@markmccaughrean Maybe I didn't read the thread carefully enough, but what does that cancellation mean for the planned moon landing?
🤔
@kallekn I'm not fully up-to-speed on all the details, but the original Moon landing mission was supposed to Artemis III, but was already moved to IV. ESM-3 & ESM-4 were delivered by Airbus to KSC in Aug 2024 & Nov 2025, respectively, so those parts of the hardware for those missions is in place.
Whether ESA will get its promised lunar astronauts (in principle the first should be German) & what happens to ESM-5 & 6, I don't know.
@kallekn That's all down to the Child King & whether his rockets can deliver the promised goods.
There's an awful lot of difficult work to be done to prove that the single HLS Starship can be refuelled in LEO by a whole fleet of other tanker & depot Starships (somewhere between 10 & 20!!) as is required.
Truly, the concept is utterly bananas & I don't know how / why anyone ever signed up to it.
I mean, Apollo was *far* simpler more than fifty years ago.
@m @happydisciple I would hope that’s the case, as ESA & its Member States (thus the taxpayers) have spent a lot of money on the ESM 🙂 I do know that the Leiden-built solar wings were trumpeted on TV in NL, but quite whether this message is getting across to the general public more broadly, I don’t know.
If & when a European flies on Artemis, that should change, but even then, as we know, ESA astronauts are generally only well-known in their home country.
@markmccaughrean The NASA stream I've been watching did mention the ESM module. I'm pleased that it's an international effort and also that they didn't try some half-assed attempt to use SpaceX equipment which is untested for a lunar mission.
Now if we can just purge the white supremacists out of our government...
@mpotter That's good to hear & yes, of course in principle I'm happy that Europe is part of the programme. But US politics has shifted greatly since that collaboration started, & personally (I no longer speak for ESA), I'm deeply unhappy about the geopolitical context this is happening in.
As for the Child King, I still can't believe anyone signed up to the ludicrous HLS concept. 10-20 Starship launches to fuel another Starship depot in LEO, then transferring that to the actual lunar lander?
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