Europe's space scientists are facing some tough decisions, after the member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) agreed a five-year budget that will require some planned missions to be cut.

Meeting in Edinburgh last week, ministers from 15 European nations and Canada agreed funding for ESA's entire range of projects. They committed 1.869 billion euros (US$1.6 billion) over five years to the agency's science programme, into which all members pay a mandatory subscription according to their wealth. This maintains roughly level funding, including a modest compensation for inflation. But David Southwood, director of ESA's science programme, had asked for 1.945 billion euros. “The outcome is satisfactory, but a big loss on what we were hoping for,” he says.

Southwood speculates that a single big project is most likely to be sacrificed. He says the GAIA satellite, which would map the distances and positions of the billion brightest objects in the sky and is scheduled for launch by 2012, “is in some jeopardy”. Lennart Lindegren of the Lund Observatory in Sweden, one of GAIA's principal investigators, says this would be “extremely disappointing”.

Preparation for the Aurora programme, an ambitious long-term plan for robotic and human exploration of the Solar System (see Nature 411, 625; 2001), was one of the non-mandatory programmes given the go-ahead, but in reduced form. Delegates were shocked when Italy, which had been Aurora's main advocate, came to the table empty-handed.

Italy had originally offered to pay 40% of the 40 million euros needed for a three-year preparation programme. But given the current squeeze on research spending (see page 384), “Italy must be content to be one of the participants in a very reduced global programme”, says Giovanni Bignami, scientific director of the Italian space agency. Under pressure from other ESA members, the Italian delegation finally agreed to contribute 2 million euros towards a total of 14 million euros. France, Britain, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal and Canada also subscribed to the programme.

In a strong message to the United States, the ministers decided to hold back 60% of ESA's exploitation budget for the International Space Station (ISS), pending NASA's agreement to fulfil its original agreement to operate the ISS with a full crew of six. Without this, it will be hard to carry out scientific research. “Europe will fulfil its obligations and expects the same from our partners,” said German science minister Edelgard Bulmahn, who chaired the meeting.

But given the nomination of a NASA administrator who appears determined to cap the space station's budget (see next article), it is unclear whether ESA's move will have the desired effect. And there were signs that ESA members have doubts about the station's scientific potential. The ELIPS programme, which will support experiments in both physical and life sciences on board the ISS, received only 166.5 million euros of the requested budget of 320 million euros.

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