INTRODUCTION

The Confederation of European Aerospace Societies - CEAS - was founded in 1992 by the RAeS of Great Britain, the German DGLR, the French AAAF and the Italian AIDAA, representing the leading countries in European aerospace activities.

In 1994, the Confederation was enlarged with the joining of the Spanish AIAE and the NVvL from The Netherlands. More recently also the Swedish FTF and the Swiss SVFW have become members. In the near future, other societies will be included making the CEAS even more representative of the European aerospace community.

At present, the CEAS counts over twenty thousand individual members from a variety of sectors having a connection with aerospace: from scientists and researchers to industrial leaders, and from technicians and engineers to experts and specialists not directly linked professionally to the sector.

The Board of Directors of the CEAS has felt the need to prepare a document on the future of European space activities because it recognises that internationally, and in Europe in particular, the sector is going through a difficult and delicate period of profound change.

The future of space requires major decisions on the direction it is to take.

Space offers benefits to the whole European community, and to the political, cultural, social, industrial and technological fabric of the world in general.

If continuity of impetus is ensured, then space promises to offer even more.

Moreover, Europe has developed a space and user community in science and industry to implement and exploit space opportunities. Indeed, in some fields like telecommunications and launchers, European industry is progressively becoming commercially successful. There are other areas, however, where the potentially huge benefits have not yet been exploited, or even initiated. There is a need to focus European objectives and programmes properly to support the continuation of the process of realising such potential and to render space activities stable and continuous.

The political motives for supporting space need to be reintroduced and reinforced for a number a reasons. First, the benefits now materialising need to be exploited further. Second, space is one of the best opportunities for international cooperation. Third, it is a high technology sector with the potential to generate wealth commercially. Fourth, space represents an opportunity for new impetus after the Cold War; in this new world order, space may provide a natural focus for the continuation of developing high technology and advanced civil and military applications. Surprisingly, this opportunity has not yet been properly exploited nor even fully identified.

The CEAS recognises that it has a constitucional obligation to make an effort to contribute to renewing momentum and direction in European space activities.

This paper therefore aims to propose a contribution to the positive resolution of the problems by bringing into evidence the need for space activities and examining European policy in the sector. As a conclusion, the necessity for a long-term European space vision is identified, in the belief that one way of predicting the future is to shape it.

1. THE BENEFITS OF SPACE ACTIVITY

The prime advantage of space lies in the globality of its applications and its long-term potential. It opens new horizons and offers new possibilities for scientific research, for advanced technology and for the proliferation of practical applications. It also stimulates mankind's desire to explore the unknown and expand the borders of our Earth in the attempt to understand better the universe in which we live.

The exploratory elements of space will be pursued primarily by the more developed countries with an established vitality and vision. Such activities will also contribute to maintaining these countries' leadership, as they strive to cross technological frontiers.

In the field of practical applications, on the other hand, a series of immediate benefits is evident in communications, broadcasting, meteorology and navigation, for example, making space an investment also for the near future which pays dividends in the short-term. As these applications become mature, so they become more commercial. Some of this commercial experience has already been accrued in launchers and telecomunications. Beyond that, the sectors of Earth observation and navigation and positioning systems should continue to be supported as they are demonstrating promising business potential.

For the less developed nations that so far have not had access to space, an acquisition of the technologies involved will help raise their standard of living, also through a direct contribution to improving levels of education by means of broadcasting nationwide educational programmes. With better education, these countries can develop their own technological base, thereby creating national wealth. Space is an area which could also provide a non-militaristic introduction to high technology to a large number of emerging nations.

Space can therefore be viewed as one of the drivers for technological revolution that will spread around the world in the next century. The impulse space activities give to new initiatives in various fields of advanced application and their spin-offs from high technology in even the most unexpected fields contribute to the process of enriching the world not only in terms of real wealth but also socially and culturally by bridging the gap between nations.

As an advanced sector in Europe already involving a large number of specialised people in industry and rescarch, space has an important role to play in the make-up of the new order of the Europe of the third millennium.

Apart from stimulating new technologies and providing countries with industries that give weight to their international standing, the participation of many countries helps to fill the technological gaps between them and to create the culture of a united Europe.

The globality of space initiatives and the wide dissemination of their benefits indeed make space a strategic sector for Europe.

As such, a vision for its future is needed: a long-term policy supported by all the countries to be implemented in a stepwise approach with continuity and determination.

Most space programmes require many years for their accomplishment due to the high complexity and uniqueness of each mission. This, combined with their internacional nature, necessitates that each national commitment to the programmes be protected against the influence of economic recessions and recoveries - cycles that happen at different times in different countries - in the same way as has been successfully applied in comparable programmes in other fields. At the same time, benefits and spin-offs materialising in the course of a programme must be exploited in the shortterm.

2. THE SPACE COMMUNITY AND ITS ACTIVITIES

The different entities and individuals connected with space activities in one way or another each have a specific role to play for Europe's future in space.

The national govemments and, progressively, the European Union have the role to provide the general policies and directives which ESA - the European Space Agency - and the national space agencies then put into operation, controlling the progress of the specific programmes.

The scientific and user communities, the educational institutions and industry have a double role in that they are both the generators of the market and the executors of space activities, first proposing missions or identifying needs, then conceiving the instruments and tools to realise them.

Broadly speaking, space activities in turn can be grouped into five main categories covering many interlinked fields and requiring a common base of knowledge matured in scientific and industrial research. Each category naturally has its own characteristics whose proper management requires apposite structures and highly-skilled, specialist operational staff: all together they make the space community.

The central category of activities comprises the fundamental support systems for "access to, and retum from the space environment' and is the cornerstone of all the rest. Included in this key group are the manned and unmanned orbiting infrastructures and the outposts on the Moon and Mars. To support all these activities, unified, correlated and interconnected ground infrastructures are needed as well.

The importance of this category cannot be overstated: obviously it is the prerequisite of the others as all the activities presuppose getting into space. Access systems are therefore indispensable and must become less expensive, so as to widen the base of space users. Alongside that, there is the need for manned and umnanned systems to be able to remain in space for longer than presently possible and satisfy the requirements of such a broader base. Investment, in terms of both financial and research resources, must therefore be made in technologies supporting these programmes if space is to develop profitably.

The second category - 'scientific activities' - covers a wide range of disciplines in which astronomy, meteorology, geodesy, life sciences, space physics and experiments exploiting the microgravity enviromnent have up to now been the most frequent. To spur new initiatives and broaden the base of scientific interest in space, other fields of basic research - for example, the diverse branches of physics - can, and must, be encouraged to look to space as their natural experimental and research laboratory.

One of the basic objectives of space research beyond the knowledge and understanding of our universe is to obtain services and products which also have a short-term financiak return: these 'applications of space' form the third category of activity.

Among these, fields such as telecommunications and meteorology are well-established, and navigation and positioning systems for land and maritime traffic are maturing quickly. Promising new utilisations, such as taking advantage of the microgravity environment for new products and production methods, need to be encouraged for the future.

One space science that has become a beneficial application is the area of Earth observation which has already been used effectively for environmental monitoring and national security purposes.

The fourth category of activities is the "military use of space'. Now that the long period of antagonism has ended with the relatively peaceful close of the Cold War, space can still offer a variety of applications for security purposes. In the present military scenario, monitoring and control can, and must, be carried out with the contribution of space. The highly advance technologies used will also have inherent repercussions in civil applications.

Last, but by no means least, there is the utilisation of space to confront "global Earth issues ". This covers a series of initiatives that in the long term could help resolve the present and future needs of our Earth. Ideas and schemes have already been discussed in the past and have included protection from meteoroids and other celestial objects, active environmental control and large space infrastructures to bolster diminishing world resources, such as energy.

All these activities together make up the entity of space and the categories cannot be separated when it comes to drawing up strategies and policies, particularly the long-term ones. This is, moreover, especially pertinent when dealing with a reality the size of Europe.

Furthermore, although they have different users, needs, ends and timescales, all these fields have a common denominator in space technology. The complexity of space activities means the technology is drawn from a number of fields, such as aerothermal dynamics, electronics, mechanisms and robotics, propulsion and power generation, structures and materials.

So that these technologies may continue to be developed, Europe needs to strengthen and broaden the organisational structures to incorporase and coordinate research centres and educacional institutions, medium-sized specialised industries and large space industries able to create the space systems.

Over the past forty years almost every area of industrial production and everyday life has profited from space activities either directly or through technology transfer and spin-offs. In particular, we may highlight air and ground transport, medicine and all areas of communications. Bringing the achievements of advanced technology into these applications demonstrates that the commitment to excellence of space programmes in the long run generales economic and scientific benefits far above their costs, also in the short and medium term.

3. A POLICY FOR EUROPE

Up to the present, Europe has made considerable investments in space, developing a large number of programmes mainly under the coordination of ESA. In addition, several single countries have, through their national space agencies, pursued important plans and projects.

The success of the collaboration in the context of ESA can be seen in the results: twenty-eight scientific, application and telecommunications satellites launched so far; development of the Ariane family of expendable launchers, culminating now with Ariane V; participation with the USA in orbital infrastructures with the first pressurised manned laboratory Spacelab and the Eureca retrievable platform; and now the collaboration on the International Space Station.

Despite these major achievements of the past thirty years, Europe is now displaying some difficulty in supporting past plans and objectives and a worrying decline in commitment to the future.

Europe needs to restructure its long-term plans to recover momentum. In particular, it should adapt its space contributions to the budgets of the other primary space powers. This will allow more challenging objectives to be reached using the right means that also ensure return on investment in the short, medium and long term.

To maintain and then improve its position, Europe must consolidase and heavily reinforce its presence in all the five categories of space activity describes earlier, and it may do this in a variety of ways: autonomously and recourse to global international cooperation through bi- or trilateral programmes and individual national initiatives.

All these efforts must be part of a European long-term policy supported by firm plans ensuring adequate funding for its successful implementation.

In particular, Europe should establish its position on new advanced transportation systems, on the need for different, manned and unmanned in-orbit infrastructures, and on lunar and planetary exploration. As these are huge, complex and very costly undertakings, ESA must be strengthened in order to represent Europe properly in the international cooperation necessary to support them.

With regard to scientific activities, ESA's mandatory scheme has thus far allowed Europe to enjoy a highly successful long-term policy. This scheme should therefore be continued, particularly in advanced space research, but with the addition of a better verification of the integration with national programmes. These latter should be concentrated on the small and medium-sized missions that fill the voids left by the broader-scale European ones.

For the application programmes, government support of research and development over the years has allowed European industry to reach sufficient maturity to go beyond the basic research and develop and exploit certain applications on their own. In many cases, the industries have then been able to compete for programmes against (or also often in cooperation with) US companies.

Europe must maintain a high leves of support to the further advance of research and development of new technologies so that the industries that have achieved a presence on the open market of application programmes can continue and build on their success. For the greater success of this policy, cooperation would be opportune with other technological programmes, harmonising national and European initiatives.

The changes in Europe's geopolitical enviromnent at the end of the 1980's now allow a propitious period for a new age in the field of military space. The common goal for Europe should be to have its own space segment (communications and observation) to permit credible crisis prevention or management.

The contribution of space to solving global Earth issues will inevitably become greater and will need to be confronted on a worldwide level. Europe's policies need to be drawn up and eventually coordinated by an ad hoc, high-level, internacional body with the technical support of ESA and the other major space agencies.

Certain space programmes are by their very nature so complex and global in their implications that worldwide international cooperation is a must. Europe therefore needs to take action to be an active and leading partner in all the projects requiring that form of internacional cooperation.

Moreover, the overall strategy for Europe's involvement must clearly foresee which programmes are intended for full international cooperation, which on a European level, which in eventual bilateral collaboration, and which purely national.

Historically, Europe's culture and politics have placed it in a central position with respect to the present space powers. If we want to enjoy the same situation for the future and remain one of the advanced space nations, Europe must look to active cooperations with diverse partners - USA, Pacific Rim countries, CIS and developing countries - each one of whom requires apposite policies.

4. A CEAS PROPOSAL FOR A "LONG-TERM EUROPEAN SPACE POLICY"

Considering the strategic importance of space activities to Europe, their complex variety and interconnection, and the number of protagonists who have duties, rights and interests in contributing to them,

the Confederation of European Aerospace Societies proposes that Europe embark on the establishment of a long-term strategic vision for space.

This is to be executed with the participation of the national European governments and also in the understanding that the European Union is interested in increasing its commitment to space with the possibility of establishing a European Space Council.

The vision will provide the framework for specific European strategies and plans to guarantee three major objectives that the CEAS has identified:

• provide a global dimension to the space sector consonant with a vision of the future
• integrate short-term needs with long-term plans through the management of international agreements and national programmes
• ensure a technological competitive capability in space activities over the years.

The vision and framework must involve the contribution of the European nations and interested parties and be structured not as a theoretical plan but containing a verification of its practicar feasibility.

It must therefore contain all the necessary inputs in its construction, approval, funding, implementation and management so as to be executed in such a way as to demonstrate the coherence and capacity of a strong and united Europe.

The role of Europe itself in the international arena should also be clearly identified as well as the priorities for collaboration.

Naturally, the framework should be structured including medium-term objectives and taking into consideration present ESA and national plans within the long-term vision, and managed in a relatively flexible way in the face of changing scenarios. Continuity of the commitments already made in telecommunications, Earth observation and so on must be considered alongside the new initiatives.

In this light, and to achieve the objectives, the CEAS further proposes the establishment of a dedicated body in the form of a

European Space Policy Technical Advisory Group

to formulate the basis for such a long-term vision.

In the case that the EU is already considering the formation of a similar structure with the same long-term objectives, then the CEAS considers its proposed Advisory Group necessary to provide the technical input to the EU's organisation. If, on the other hand, the EU does not intend, for the time being, to draw up such a long-term strategic activity, then the CEAS proposal becomes even more relevant and valuable.

In any case, the CEAS puts itself forward as the guiding element to coordinase the consultant body which must be drawn from internacional recognised experts in the sector and must harmonise the views of all involved areas: science and technology, finance, education, industry.

The 'Technical Advisory Group' must consider the previously describes five categories of space activity individually and as part of a greater whole, screening the possibilities for establishing future enterprises and focusing Principal but not exclusively, on:

• transportation systems, comprising new expendable and recoverable launchers, new specialised manned and cargo support systems for access to and return from orbit, including inter-orbital operations
• second-generation in-orbit infrastructures located in Low Earth Orbit and eventually in Geostationary orbit
• elements for the exploration and ultimately the exploitation of the Moon and Mars (including ad hoc transport systems, robotic devices and manned bases).

The 'Technical Advisory Group' must also scrutinise new sectors of space utilisation carefully, seeking emerging opportunities and potential new trends.

Naturally, the framework must envisage intermediary milestones that ensure the achievement of results and also contain elements capable of activating all those initiatives able to offer useful returns for mankind as they become mature.

The CEAS has carefully examined the potencial of industrial opportunities deriving from space activity and has recognised that a distinction must be made between the long and the short term.

Short-term opportunities exist and are already being partially exploited. The conditions for further advance in those fields need to he maintained and carefully expanded.

The long-term ones are of a completely different scale in terms of the size of investments and the potential of the return. For example, the Moon can be considered as nothing less than a giant natural space station and laboratory within our future reach. Lunar industrialisation would open up a huge potential for supplying Earth with energy and material products in an environmnentally clean way. Lunar conditions are harsh, but used properly the Moon can be turned into a large and extremely advantageous reservoir.

Lunar development is by no means a small venture, but it can be broken down into smaller steps that, with the proper coordination of internacional efforts, can make the undertaking easier. Planned in this way, projects of this magnitude would offer perspectives of immense potencial for developed and developing nations alike, bridging generations and calling for the contribution of the young generation worldwide.

The CEAS recommends ESA to start a process of investigation and planning to proceed along these lines, activating European studies and research that will progressively constitute the basis for the subsequent political decisions, perhaps leading also to the establishment of a dedicated legal body to oversee development of lunar and extraterrestrial resources.

If, as would seem likely, the EU continues to take ever more interest in space activity, then its political and economic role will mean it will have increasing responsibility for establishing a frame of reference for the long-term policies. In the course of this process of closer integration, the member countries will continue, through the system of Ministerial Conferences, to discuss and approve the shorter term programmes deriving from the long-term vision. In addition, the EU will ensure that the governments abide by the plan eventually agreed upon. The executive role of ESA will remain to implement and manage those programmes, with the exception of the military and commercial ones.

The 'Technical Advisory Group' will contribute to this organisational structure through its expert consultancy. It will therefore be the responsibility of the EU and the national governments to encourage, fund, activate and support the Group, making it an integral element in the European decision and planning process. In this way, the Group will be out of the context of the lives of individual national governments, providing continuity over the years and able progressively to elaborate more concrete plans.

Overall, the strategic, long-term planning will serve to enlarge Europe's vision of space - for example to a horizon of 30 years -, unite diverse interests, strengthen management and stabilise the operative relations between partners. Such a long-term framework will also help mitigate the tendency for the desire for short-term results leading in many cases to the impoverishment of the investment for the future.

Beyond these fundamental aims, the long-term policy must broaden the discussion of the problems of the space sector, widen the base of the people involved and have space activities known to a larger public. These, together with the debate and discussion within the European parliament, will contribute to forming the base for how space is to become an integral part of European culture and not remain merely restricted to an individual aspect of it.

It will bring into clear focus the directions the European countries are taking in space so that the greater public feels more involved and informed. The necessary transparency will also be a support in the justification of the spending, bringing the public to a more convinced acceptance of space enterprise.

Finally, the vision must galvanise Europe at all levels, involving all sectors, not merely those already connected to space, and spurring them on to new initiatives and breakthroughs so that Europe does not waste the considerable efforts and notable successes of the past, nor miss the great opportunity of the future.

Europe has the potential to enter the third millennium as a major world player in space activity, and every reason to want to do so.