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.
@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.
Mark McCaughrean
Birchbirch