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Europe's space ministers have been told that a planned mission to Mars — known as Mars Express — will almost certainly have to be abandoned unless they lift a ‘cap’ placed two years ago on the science budget of the European Space Agency (ESA).

The warning came last week from members of ESA's Science Programme Committee (SPC). It forms part of a resolution outlining the consequences of the budget cap imposed at a ministerial meeting in 1995. The cap has already led to a 9 per cent reduction in the budget of the science programme.

The resolution also warns of the threat to the concept of large ‘cornerstone’ missions, the backbone of ESA's long-term science plan, Horizons 2000. The agency could be left unable to plan its space science strategically, and hopes for a new cornerstone mission in fundamental physics would be dashed.

“Europe will have to restrict its space programme largely to niches left by other agencies,” says the resolution. As a result, it would “lose the supranational leadership and visibility” which allowed it to emerge on the world scene.

The resolution endorses concern expressed earlier this month by ESA's Space Science Advisory Committee (see Nature 390, 8; 1997). As the SPC is made up of delegates from member states, it is closer to ministers than the advisory committee, whose 11 members are independent space scientists.

Nevertheless few feel that the programme committee is likely to influence the course of financial stringency on which Europe's space ministers seem set, particularly as any decision to restore full index-linking of the ESA budget would require unanimous support from member states. Several — including Germany, Britain and Sweden — remain opposed to lifting the funding limit.

But Johann Bleecker, director of the Dutch Space Research Organization, and one of his country's delegates to the SPC, hopes that an awareness that Europe's international status in space efforts could suffer if it abandons its independent mission to Mars will shake ministers out of their stubbornness.

One piece of good news was announced at the SPC meeting last week. After several years of negotiations, ESA has signed an agreement with the Russian Space Agency that Integral, the gamma-ray observatory, will be launched on a Russian Proton launcher on schedule in April 2001.

In exchange for the launch, Russian astronomers will have access to about a quarter of Integral's observing time. Integral was approved as the next ESA medium-sized mission in 1993.