paris

Uncertainty is hanging over Europe's joint science space programmes. Members of the European Space Agency (ESA) are expected to demand cuts when ministers meet later this year to endorse a new space strategy.

ESA's ruling council reaffirmed support for the programme last week. But agreement on funding for Horizons 2000, ESA's dedicated basic science programme, over the next five years was conspicuously absent from its strategy.

“There is an issue in governments' minds about how important basic science is, how much it deserves,” says one UK official.

Ministers seem unlikely to lift a cap on science spending, imposed two years ago at the United Kingdom's demand, that has cut the science budget by 9 per cent. Sweden and France are believed to share UK opposition to lifting this cap, while Germany and Spain are said to want bigger cuts.

Roger Bonnet, ESA head of science, says budgets are already strained to breaking point and any new cuts would seriously disrupt a series of science missions planned for the next decade. ESA's Science Programme Committee has already warned that Mars Express, a ECU150 million (US$163 million) mission to Mars, will probably be cancelled unless the cap is lifted.

Bonnet has tried to reduce costs by delegating management to industry and using technologies from existing missions. He has oriented the agency's ECU300 million for ‘medium-sized missions’ towards smaller, flexible ones, including technology-testing missions (see Nature 385, 380; 1997). But such measures increase the risk, he adds.

One UK official argues that the cap has promoted cost-effectiveness. “There is no way ESA would have in the past proposed a mission to Mars with a price tag as low as ECU150 million,” he says. “Bonnet has gone three-fifths of the way, but still has some distance to go.”

But David Southwood, professor of physics at Imperial College, London, and currently on secondment to ESA, says there is little scope for further economies and warns against the risk of “service degradation”.

There are also fears that the total cost of programmes in the proposed ESA strategy (see above) is likely to exceed the annual budget of ECU2.5 billion. Leaving aside the prospect of cost overruns, ESA's contribution to the international space station will increase from ECU300 million now to E CU500 million in 2000, while the proposals contain plans to develop more powerful launchers based on the new Ariane 5 rocket. Bonnet warns that competing pressures on the budget mean science riskspaying for any shortfall.