alternatehistory.com

Why no European deep space probes in the 70's, 80's ? Because...

(One can ask why Europe didn't become the third major space power - why didn't the Europeans send probes to the Moon, Venus, Mars, the asteroids ?)

20 December 1971

Two sessions of the fourth meeting of the European Space Conference, on 22-24 July and 4 November 1970, did not succeed in reaching an agreement on the critical issues of launcher development and relationship with the United States.

The latent crisis that had for some years characterised the European space activities burst out at the second meeting, where "the disunity between the countries favouring a 'coherent policy' including an independent European launcher effort and the others reached such a magnitude that the meeting broke up".
By the end of the year 1970 all plans for a unified European organisation receded and the future itself of Europe in space appeared rather grim. Denmark and France went as far as to denounce the ESRO Convention in order not to incur financial obligations extending beyond the first eight year period.

The new Chairman of the Council, the Italian physicist G. Puppi, former Chairman of the ESC's Committee of Senior Officials, was given the task of negotiating a suitable compromise in order to drive the Organisation, as smoothly as possible, to its new institutional obligations in the application field and, at the same time, to offer European space policymakers new ground for negotiations.

After one full year of intense negotiations and several Council meetings, in December 1971 the compromise was worked out and it became known as the "first package deal".

The main aspect of the deal is the decision that ESRO should finally cease to be an organisation solely devoted to scientific research and undertake three application satellite programmes with different sets of Member States involved (optional programmes).

Here the four major Member States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy agreed to participate in three applications satellite programmes, thus establishing the backbone of what became known as the first package deal.

It took another six months, however, for delegates to agree on all the interlocking components of this package deal in which the science programme, along with its various components – satellites, sounding rockets (at ESTRANGE in Kiruna, Sweden) and basic research (at Esrin in Frascati) – was the major loser.

The final resolution on the reform of ESRO was, in fact, only adopted by the Council at its 44th session on 20 December 1971.

The 1971 package deal marked "the beginning of a new period in the life of ESRO".

The Organisation was definitely transformed into a space agency mainly devoted to application satellites with only a minor fraction of its jobs and funds devoted to science.

During the laborious negotiations which led to the compromise, "the whole scientific programme was put in some doubt", the chairman of the STC reported.
In the first draft of Puppi's package deal, in fact, it was suggested that the scientific programme should be made optional from 1974, a position strongly supported by France, and only with a drastic reduction of funds had it been finally agreed to keep it mandatory.

The sum of 27 MAU, however, fell quite short of scientists' expectations. The statement concluded that "the minimum level of funding required for a truly viable scientific satellite programme lies between 43 and 47 MAU".

Whatever, the budget was to stay flat at 27 MAU for a decade or more - imagine if NASA robotic exploration program was capped at 20 million dollar annually !

M.A.U = Million Accounting Unit
1 M.A.U = 0.75 dollar