When you think space, you probably think
one space agency that travels under the radar is ESA.
Which is surprising considering
what the European Space Agency has achieved
and how vital it is to the global space industry.
We've collaborated with pretty much everybody
who is involved in space exploration.
But ESA wants to be a leading force
in furthering humanity's mission into space.
For the first time, we're playing a key role
in a human space flight mission
that goes beyond low Earth orbit.
Commander Ground, do you copy?
Copy.
No sampling.
If we want to have successful human missions to Mars,
we are going to have to learn to live and work
off-world in a different way.
The place where we are going to learn to do that
is on the Moon.
In a world where working together
seems to be getting more and more difficult,
can ESA help humanity take its next giant leap?
Established in 1975, ESA touches most corners of Europe.
Unlike other agencies, it's a diverse collective.
The European Space Agency
is an inter-governmental organization
with 22 member states from Europe.
The core to ESA's success
is that international collaboration.
Its formative years were mainly spent
working in conjunction with NASA
and its record in space is pretty special.
From launching the world's first high orbit telescope
and studying comets up close,
perhaps its most famous mission
was launched with NASA in 1990.
We joined with NASA to build the Hubble Space Telescope
and of course that's been flying now
for more than 30 years.
Hubble has since discovered
more distant objects than any terrestrial instrument.
In 2003, ESA launched the Mars Express orbiter,
the first fully European mission to a planet.
Since then, there's been the farthest landing from Earth
made on Saturn's moon Titan,
and the first robotic landing on a comet.
ESA has also invested in Earth observation satellites,
telecommunications and even built Europe's own GPS system.
But its astronauts haven't journeyed
beyond the 400 kilometer orbit
of the International Space Station.
We've never played a key role
until now in human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.
But with the Artemis mission, which will enable us
to send humans back to the Moon for the first time,
ESA is a central part of that.
ESA has built the service module of the Orion Crew Vehicle
and the NASA and ESA astronauts
that will ride on that capsule to the Moon
will be powered by European technology.
In 2019, ESA ministers
committed to its biggest ever budget,
an approved and ambitious portfolio of space programs.
While ESA cannot compete with the likes of NASA
when it comes to spending,
ESA provides valuable science services that have made it
an essential partner in NASA's Artemis program.
ESA will contribute habitation and refueling modules
along with enhanced communications.
It'll also be responsible for operating elements
on the Lunar Gateway,
a permanent station in orbit around the Moon.
The Lunar Gateway has two functions really.
It's the first place that humans will go
to live and work for extended periods beyond Earth's orbit.
So we're really exposing humans
to a location which is in deep space
where the environment and the conditions
are very different from what we find on the space station.
This gives us a test bed, somewhere to learn
how to live and work in deep space
for long periods of time.
It's also somewhere where we can perform
scientific research which will prepare us
for future exploration in deep space.
We're also working on a large lunar lander,
which would take cargo, logistics, robotics
and other equipment to the surface of the Moon
as a contribution to the human missions
that are going to follow during the 2020s.
The first human missions
to return to the surface of the Moon
are planned for the latter part of this decade.
Those could be followed by the buildup
of infrastructure and capability.
So we could be seeing a sustained presence on the Moon
into the 2020s.
Sustainability is going to be based
on having the infrastructure and the facilities
to enable long-term access
and if you want to do that on the Moon
in a long-term sustainable way,
we're going to have to learn to use the resources
that we find locally wherever we can.
If you can take the regolith,
the ground up dusty rocky powder
that we find at the lunar surface,
if we can then bind that together,
we can create structures.
Those structures can protect us
from the very hot and very cold environment,
so create some thermal shielding.
We can also use it to create radiation shielding
and so it's regular 3D printing where you take this stuff
and you 3D print it into the structures you need.
It's a really exciting technology for future applications.
Gravity on the Moon is much lower
than it is on Earth,
so launching a rocket off the lunar surface
would potentially be easier
as it requires much less thrust.
Less thrust means less fuel,
making room in the rocket for the essential payloads
to get humans to Mars and beyond.
The Moon's polar regions also have
large supplies of water ice,
which could be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen,
useful ingredients needed for humans to breathe
and rockets to fly.
This return to the Moon will prepare us for Mars.
So we're going to be performing cutting edge science,
the like of which has never been done before.
Humans last stepped onto the Moon
nearly 50 years ago.
Now, multiple nations, including China, Russia and India
all have planned missions.
Unlike the Apollo missions, which lasted just days,
new missions will be much longer
because we now think the Moon can teach us so much more.
Off the coast of West Africa,
Lanzarote's volcanic landscape might be the closest thing
to the lunar surface here on Earth.
It's why ESA comes here to run its Pangea program,
a specialized international training course for astronauts.
Some of the reasons that we're gonna go back to the Moon
are to look at very early planetary system formation
so we can understand the Earth Moon system.
Commander Ground, we wanted to...
As well as Europeans,
ESA is training NASA astronaut Dr. Kate Rubins.
Rubins has already spent 300 days in space,
but as part of NASA's Artemis program,
she's likely to become the first woman to walk on the Moon.
It's very stark, it's very volcanic,
and that's actually similar to the Moon.
There are ancient volcanoes on the Moon.
Even the regolith on the Moon is this kind of glassy
volcanic rock that we see here.
You're looking at hundreds of millions of years of time
and our hope is to discover some of these
very, very early rocks.
Possibly, these rocks would be thrown up
through the magma near a volcano.
So today, we are taking
the physical samples of the rock and the biology,
but we're also taking things like spectra.
So we can shoot some light at the rock
and see what bounces back at us
and different minerals are gonna bounce back
different spectral patterns.
The Moon's a fantastic laboratory
for understanding the solar system.
Unlike on Earth, where we have plate tectonics,
we have an atmosphere, we have water,
it kind of destroys the rock record a little bit.
On the Moon, we don't have any of that.
So actually, it's very much like it was
in its early history
and in fact, people have talked about
finding parts of Earth on the Moon that are much older
than a lot of the rocks we can find on Earth
and they're still in a more pristine state
because the Moon hasn't had the overturn
that you get on the earth.
Commander Ground, do you copy?
The Pangea training course
isn't just preparing these astronauts for the Moon.
It's training them to look for signs of life
that might be more likely elsewhere in the solar system.
Volcanic environments look very barren on Earth.
There's rocks with no plants often,
especially if they're very fresh
volcanic environments, very new.
But in reality actually, there's a lot of microbial life
living in rocks and on rocks
and in all sorts of parts of a volcanic environment
like you can see around me.
So understanding the places
where the most interesting biology is
is very important for training astronauts
in terms of what they should target when they go to Mars,
and also just for scientists to understand
where we should look for searching for life on Mars.
This was a day where they were letting us be autonomous.
So we were making some of the discoveries
like we would do on the lunar surface.
So some of the things that we were finding
were very interesting was an area
where there was some possible maybe hydrothermal vents
or some water interaction coming up
and we could see some alterations in the minerals.
So that kind of thing would be incredibly important
and very valuable if we saw that on the surface of Mars.
This would be an example of a place that you would stop
and do a lot of sampling for life.
The other thing that's really important
is the context of the sample.
So we need to know this isn't just a rock
that we plucked off the ground, but where is it?
Is it close to the hot spring? Is it near the volcano?
Was it an early sample? Was it a later sample?
All of that kind of metadata is really critical
in understanding that geo biology sample in the context
of everything else that was going on in the environment.
The Moon could serve as a proving ground
for the technologies of the future,
helping humanity learn how to live and work in space
and launch missions to bodies
further than ever before, like Mars.
If you look at the surface of Mars,
there's lots of channels that have been carved by water.
Early on in its history,
it was probably a very different planet,
probably a lot more habitable, much more conducive to life.
Potentially, there's a lot we can learn
about what biology is in terms of
kind of a feature of the universe.
We can learn by going to Mars
because perhaps it was habitable early,
but maybe life never developed,
so we need to understand why that is,
or if life developed how long it lasted there,
maybe it was transferred to Earth,
maybe it was transferred from Earth to Mars.
So there's all sorts of different questions
that could get answered by understanding more about Mars.
In ESA's Planetary Robotics Lab
in the Netherlands, scientists maneuver
a half scale version of the ExoMars rover,
part of a mission due to launch in 2022.
To date, only NASA and China have landed rovers
on the red planet.
Joining them would be a coup for ESA.
Along with several other high-tech instruments,
the ExoMars rover will be the first that can drill
to a depth of two meters,
something that could deliver groundbreaking science
for the agency.
We believe that material brought from below the surface
has a better chance to bring some interesting discoveries
because the samples would have been basically protected
by the depths from the heavy radiation
and the turmoil cycles that apply on the surface
and which may be explain why so far the samples
taken over from the surface didn't reveal
anything very interesting.
The planet is not that far from the Sun
and therefore the temperature experience on the planet
are still adequate for the development of life.
The planet has also a kind of similar region
and development as planet Earth
and therefore we can hope to find traces of biological life
if we properly sound the soil of the planet.
The rover was a difficult realization,
but I believe we are there.
We must wield the technology to do this sort of vehicle,
not only the vehicle,
but also the integration of science instruments
and the realization of the laboratory and of the drill
which allows to pick up the samples
from underneath the surface.
ESA has suffered setbacks
with its Mars missions before, so the stakes are high.
For this mission, ESA is working with Roscosmos.
The Russian space agency is providing
the landing craft and the rocket
to deliver the European rover.
Russia's involvement came after NASA said
it could no longer fund the purchase
of two U.S. Atlas V rockets of ExoMars.
It serves as an example
of what the space industry can achieve
through bilateral exchanges,
most often seen on the International Space Station.
That's not to say partnerships are always easy to manage.
The evolution of the political world today
makes the setting of such cooperation a bit more at risk.
If I take the example of ExoMars,
the corporation was started at a point
when the relationship between Europe and Russia
were relatively satisfactory.
But this relation have worked so enormously
since invasion by Russia of Crimea and Ukraine
and now we have basically to deal with a partner
which is much more attentive to the way we deal with them,
much more secretive on the information they reveal,
meaning that the risk level of their deliverable
is increasing for us and waiting a lot
on the chance of success of the mission.
So we are basically to take all those parameters
into account when setting a corporation knowing that
going alone about those big and complex mission
is something that so far we cannot afford
from a budgetary point of view.
So we are still in any case to adopt cooperative good
to deliver big ambitious mission,
like the mission landing a rover on Mars.
One of my favorite phrases is that space may be a vacuum,
but it doesn't take place in one,
meaning that politics are of course
an incredibly important part of everything that we do.
Countries like China and India
are starting to challenge the U.S's position
as leaders in space technology and exploration,
competition which appears to be at odds
with ESA's core collaborative mission.
Our take on the old school space race
is kind of behind us.
The way to achieve the big goals, which phases now,
whether that's looking down at the Earth
or looking out into the universe, is best done together.
In space exploration, at the moment,
I think we see a coming together
of two things that are a little different.
One is international cooperation
and the other is competition.
I think different countries, different agencies,
different public and private actors
are aiming to have their own capability
to access and operate different places in space
and on the Moon.
As we build these different capabilities,
we create competition.
It also drives innovation, it drives down costs
and it makes it space more accessible to everybody.
So I think that this is a very positive thing.
Bringing together the value added
of working as a community in Europe has allowed us
to achieve much more than any country in Europe
could have achieved on its own.
It's not just the sum of the parts,
it's much greater than that.