As far as I know it won't be affected at all, the project is almost fully funded from the European Space Agency. And it will most likely be launched with the European Ariane rocket.
I wonder, is there any human endeavor other than space exploration (and maybe an occasional particle accelerator) that works like this? Sure, a big factor in the history of scientific progress is its structural resilience against localized political and economical kerfuffles, but that's more of an accident of how discovery and innovation are done - in small increments, achieved near-simultaneously by independent people or groups around the world (only one gets to take the credit, though). Meanwhile, it seems to me that space exploration needs to be organized into a competition to survive and thrive. To make things weirder, it's not about regular market competition - it's about staying in public consciousness, through continuously one-upping each other by Doing Something Impressive, which ends up attracting funding to all agencies each time (and conversely, when things get slow on the impressive achievements front, funding starts to dry out).
(We had one dry spell after Space Shuttles were retired, and IMHO this one could've been fatal to the entire field. Thank $deity for NASA's funding of commercial launch services, and SpaceX surviving 2008 and taking advantage of it to get the Falcon 9 to work and effectively re-light the public interest again.)
I imagine this is a transitional period; we're past the times of Cold War - times when everyone poured ~infinite money into weapons programs and space exploration got to leech some of it off - and we're not yet seeing the bootstrapping of cislunar economy on the horizon. I wonder if there's a more sustainable way of getting through to the other end, because relying on public interest feels rather risky. And, again, I can't think of any other field that is in this weird position.
bane|1 year ago
labster|1 year ago
TeMPOraL|1 year ago
(We had one dry spell after Space Shuttles were retired, and IMHO this one could've been fatal to the entire field. Thank $deity for NASA's funding of commercial launch services, and SpaceX surviving 2008 and taking advantage of it to get the Falcon 9 to work and effectively re-light the public interest again.)
I imagine this is a transitional period; we're past the times of Cold War - times when everyone poured ~infinite money into weapons programs and space exploration got to leech some of it off - and we're not yet seeing the bootstrapping of cislunar economy on the horizon. I wonder if there's a more sustainable way of getting through to the other end, because relying on public interest feels rather risky. And, again, I can't think of any other field that is in this weird position.
jcgrillo|1 year ago