Swiss to spend more on space research

Space: the final frontier Keystone Archive

The Swiss government is set to increase its spending on space research, upping its contribution to the European Space Agency (ESA) for the next four years.

The state secretary for research and science, Charles Kleiber, announced at an ESA conference this week in Edinburgh that Switzerland’s share would be increased from SFr120 million ($72 million) to more than SFr148 million in 2006. The Swiss will spend some SFr680 million over the next four years.

Some Swiss companies would have preferred to see their country’s share increased even more. Those working with the agency, such as Ascom, Contraves Space and APCO Technologies asked the government in 1999 to invest more money with ESA.

Experts say two-thirds of the money spent on ESA usually comes back to the donor country as orders for local industry. In addition, working for the space industry helps create highly qualified jobs and fosters competition.

Peter Creola, head of the Swiss Space Office plays down the criticism. “Even if the increase is modest, we are as far as I know the only country that could afford a real increase in its total participation,” he said.

Switzerland is a full member of ESA, which is not the case for most other European science initiatives. The agency is the world’s biggest intergovernmental research and development organisation, with an annual budget of SFr4.2 billion.

Ariane family of rockets

Despite its size though, ESA’s funding is only a quarter of that of its American competitor, NASA. The agency’s strong suit has been the development of the Ariane family of rockets, which have a reputation for reliability.

ESA’s biggest project at the moment is the development of the Galileo programme, a global satellite navigation system. Galileo is considered superior to the American GPS and the Russian Glonass systems.

This network is also considered important for strategic reasons. “Europe cannot depend forever on the services of an American military system, where we control neither the quality of the signal nor its availability,” Creoal told swissinfo.

“We are going to build Galileo as a more advanced system than GPS, but it will also be interoperable. From the user’s point of view it will be a big step forward.”

The system’s potential development is huge, possibly injecting €9 billion (SFr13.25 billion) into the European economy per year and creating up to 140,000 jobs.

Switzerland’s funding of ESA has not been questioned by the government. For Creola, it is important for Europe to pursue its exploration of space.

“We feel the exploration of the solar system shouldn’t be left to Nasa alone,” he said, “but that Europe should play a role commensurate with its own international position.”

swissinfo with agencies