20.11.12
Extra UK funding for European Space Agency
Member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) are meeting in Italy this week to determine programmes and budgets for the next five years. The Naples Agenda will cover around €12bn worth of activity.
The UK has decided to increase its funding for ESA, in recognition of the strength of the commercial space sector here, which it hopes can grow further. The UK will commit around £240m annually to ESA over the next five years, £60m more a year than now.
Financial difficulties in the Eurozone mean that a broadly flat budget scenario is being proposed, but the UK is keen to increase investment in order to reap high returns to the country’s economy.
The new budget will help implement newly approved missions such as a telescope to study dark energy and send a probe inside Mercury’s orbit to study the sun.
Other items up for discussion include the weather satellites system, involvement in the International Space Station, a fleet of satellites to study the earth from space and the development of the next generation platform for satellite communications.
The British science minister David Willetts told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Growth is our top priority and we're focusing our investment [at the Naples meeting] on the areas where we think we can get at least a four-to-one return for extra business investment.
“We reckon that if we have a budget of about a quarter of a billion pounds a year, we get at least a billion pounds a year of commercial business investment in the UK as a result.”
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