Europe’s flagship space science missions, carried out in collaboration with NASA, are facing a potential budget shortfall of nearly two billion dollars due to budget cuts proposed by the administration of US President Donald Trump, and the European Space Agency is hoping member states will come to the organization’s aid.
According to RCO News Agency, Representatives of the 23 member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) are scheduled to meet in Bremen, Germany at the end of November to decide on the direction of the agency for the next three years and agree on its next three-year budget.
According to Space, in this meeting, which is known as the Council of Ministers of the European Space Agency, the member states have to deal with a big problem. The Trump administration has called for drastic funding cuts to NASA, a key partner, affecting several high-profile science missions actually led by the European agency. Although the US Congress and Senate have pledged to restore at least some of this funding, discussions on NASA’s 2026 budget have yet to be concluded, so the European Space Agency will be left in the dark.
Among the highly endangered missions are the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Gravitational Wave Observatory (LISA), the EnVision Venus Orbiter and the proposed New Athena X-ray telescope.
The LISA project, whose construction began earlier this year, will be severely damaged. The planned mission, which involves three identical spacecraft flying in a triangular formation 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) apart, will rely on advanced NASA equipment worth up to $1 billion, according to the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space exploration advocacy group.
The EnVision program is expected to receive a new radar device worth approximately $300 million from NASA. The long-delayed ExoMars rover and life-seeking robot Rosalind Franklin also need a little help from NASA to reach their destination. According to the Planetary Society, this contribution is estimated at 375 million dollars. Additional contributions are planned for the large X-ray space observatory New Athena, the exoplanet observatory Ariel and 15 other smaller science missions.
These estimates are based on NASA budget commitments released in the final year of President Joe Biden’s administration, said Casey Dreyer, director of space policy at the Planetary Society.
A source familiar with the situation inside the European Space Agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agency believed it could bear the impact of the move, provided there was a good outcome at the department level for those missions. In other words, the European Space Agency will probably have to convince its member states to allocate hundreds of millions of euros to start these missions, in addition to previous financial commitments. The source added that technical capabilities exist in Europe to compensate for NASA’s pullback.
The agency has already started tenders with European industries to look for possible replacements for NASA components for the LISA mission in solar orbit, the source said. Although member state support for the rescue measure is not yet secured, the agency wants to sign initial development contracts with selected providers in January. The agency plans a similar path for EnVision.
“We are in discussions with our member states about their willingness to accept responsibility for one or more elements of NASA if recovery operations are needed,” the source said. By the middle of next year, we expect to be in a position to decide on a path forward, with clarity about NASA’s budget and the willingness and budget of member states. Then we will either stop development contracts or continue them.
The European Space Agency (ESA) was previously expected to pay about $1.9 billion for the LISA project, with several member states including Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Switzerland contributing individually.
The three LISA spacecraft, due to be launched no later than 2035, are to be linked by laser links to detect very small changes in the position of free-floating reflectors inside each spacecraft. In these measurements, researchers will be able to detect very small vibrations caused by the passage of gravitational waves.
Due to the huge distances between the spacecraft and their position outside the Earth’s gravity, LISA promises to open a new field of possibilities in gravitational wave research. Gravitational wave detectors on Earth, such as the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), are excellent at detecting waves from colliding small black holes. LISA, on the other hand, is designed to detect collisions with supermassive black holes, massive monsters with the mass of billions of suns that reside in galactic centers.
EnVision also has a unique role to play, especially after Trump’s funding proposal completely canceled NASA’s two other research missions to Venus, DaVinci and VERITAS. EnVision’s mission is to study the geological and atmospheric processes of Venus to explain why the planet evolved so differently compared to Earth.
Perhaps the most painful situation is that of Rosalind Franklin, Europe’s first rover. Equipped with a two-meter (6.6-foot) drill, the robot is designed to search for signs of life beneath the Martian surface. Originally scheduled to launch in 2018, the mission was previously shelved in 2012, when the Obama administration canceled NASA’s participation in the project.
At that time, the European Space Agency (ESA) turned to Russia to save the mission. ExoMars was set to launch in 2022 on a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur space base in Kazakhstan. However, after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, the European Space Agency (ESA) terminated this cooperation. The organization’s member states agreed to provide an additional 360 million euros ($417 million) to build a new landing pad for the rover to replace the one provided by Russia. The old rover now sits in a clean room in Milan awaiting its planned launch in 2028.
Another internal source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the European Space Agency had received “positive news” from the US that NASA funding for the mission might be restored. “It looks absolutely positive, so we’re still planning to launch as predicted,” the source said.
The problem is whether NASA leadership will decide to backtrack on commitments already made and still request a cancellation. This, from the European Space Agency’s point of view, makes relying on NASA very uncertain. Even if the budget is secured this year, who’s to say the government won’t be effective in repealing it next year? Or three years later?
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