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A transatlantic panel of space scientists has warned that attempts to boost international collaboration among space agencies are being challenged by the shift to ‘smaller, faster and cheaper’ missions. Collaboration is seen as increasingly necessary because of shrinking budgets.

This is one of the conclusions of a report by the European Space Science Committee, a body associated with the European Science Foundation and the US National Academy of Science's Space Studies Board. The report was presented last week to the US space agency NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and national space agencies.

International collaboration in space missions saves money and promotes good front-line science, says the report. But NASA's new philosophy of launching fewer big missions and more ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ missions — now being followed to some extent by ESA — discourages collaboration because of the rapid turn-around times of small missions and the reduced financial incentive to join forces.

The report summarizes studies of 142 cooperative projects and missions between the United States and individual European countries or ESA that have taken place in the last 30 years.

The report says that most international missions, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the SOHO solar mission, have been scientifically very successful. Hubble and SOHO were collaborations between NASA and ESA. Like the Germany/UK/US X-ray astronomy mission ROSAT, Hubble and SOHO were driven by clearly defined scientific goals, and backed by strong scientific communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

But the committee points out that a significant number of projects were not fully successful in meeting their scientific goals. It identifies eight key elements that could be used to assess whether future international missions are likely to be successful.

These include scientific support through peer review, clearly defined scientific goals and a strong scientific community, shared objectives between all partners, appropriate procedures for data handling and distribution, and a “sense of partnership”.

The report highlights the ESA-NASA gamma-ray astronomy mission INTEGRAL as an example of a shaky collaboration. INTEGRAL was almost abandoned in an advanced development phase because of an unexpected decision by the US Congress not to fund one of its the mission's main instruments.

The strong European gamma-ray astronomy scientific community managed to patch things up, and INTEGRAL is now due to be launched in 2001. The error in setting up the international collaboration, says the report, was that a scientific community of equivalent strength did not exist in the United States. That made the mission vulnerable to political and budgetary attack there.

Successful teamwork: ROSAT redesign caused little delay. Credit: ROSAT

In contrast, the major problems that almost inevitably occur in complex missions were able to be handled with ROSAT and SOHO because of their strong and well-coordinated scientific teams, says the report. The ROSAT hardware had to be modified at the last minute when the mission's Shuttle launch was abandoned because of the Challenger disaster, and the satellite had to be redesigned to interface with an expendable launch vehicle. But this caused little delay to the project's schedule.

Formal procedures, such as the use of standardized agreements, would help to avoid problems of misinterpretation of ad hoc agreements, and of partners pulling out of missions in their development stages, says the report.

Clear advance agreements on data handling are particularly important for Earth observation missions, where security and commercial interests have sometimes hindered data exchange.

A sense of partnership is a “recipe for success”, says the report, making it important that the media and scientific reports should acknowledge all the partners concerned. European scientists have frequently been angered by the neglect of their contributions to Hubble observations. ESA contributed 15 per cent of Hubble's development and construction costs, and wins 20 per cent of observation time through peer-reviewed competition.

John Culhane, director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London and chairman of the European Space Science Committee, says he hopes the report will encourage the agencies to develop more systematic approaches to international collaboration.

“Science can prosper from collaboration independent of the issue of saving money because it brings more creative thinking to bear on missions,” he says.