The Shackleton launch vehicle marked the beginning of a new era in the Anglo-French space program. It also proved to be the match which lit the fuse for a new round of controversy in regard to that program; from the moment the new design was unveiled to the world, it was abundantly clear building the Shackleton wouldn’t be cheap. This put the Thatcher government in England right on the horns of a great political and ideological dilemma: she’d been voted into office on the pledge of lowering taxes for the everyday British citizen, yet many of her space advisors warned her a tax increase might be the only option for funding the Shackleton’s construction.

        It didn’t take long for the British press to get wind of the divide within Thatcher’s cabinet over the Shackleton funding question, and it took even less time for Thatcher’s critics within that press to start sniping at her. Criticism of her handling of the funding dispute ran all across the ideological spectrum-- and up and down every level of the British media food chain. From the smallest Kent village weekly tabloids right up to the executive suitss of the BBC, the Conservative prime minister took serious heat for not having been more proactive in defusing this political and financial bomb before it went off.

        The brouhaha was finally ended when one of Thatcher’s junior finance ministers came up with a unique solution to the dilemma of how to fund the Shackleton without putting an excessive tax burden on the average British citizen. He proposed to sell a series of special bonds-- later nicknamed “space bonds” by the Guardian --and use the profits from those sales to create a reserve fund which could then be used to supplement the main budget for the Shackleton program. To put it more simply, the British people were being invited to personally invest in their country’s future in space. And invest they did, with a relish that back in the economically rocky ‘70s would have seemed, if not impossible, certainly very difficult to imagine. Before long, the question was less if the Shackleton would get off the ground than who would be taking it up into space for its maiden voyage-- and there were certainly no shortage of candidates on that score. Indeed, by now so many prospective candidates wanted to get into the European manned space program those who were trusted with processing the applications couldn’t keep up with them. File cabinets, desk drawers and inboxes at every space agency office in western Europe were jammed to capacity by petitions from would-be astronauts who wanted to take part in what was sure to be a historic debut launch.

   Even some NASA personnel, fed up with waiting for a slot in the Space Shuttle program, tried their luck at getting into the Shackleton project. In the end, however, it would be an all-European flight crew which manned the Shackleton’s maiden voyage when it was launched from the Caribbean in March of 1987. The inaugural mission, designated as Kepler 1 by the European Space Agency in tribute to German astronomer Johannes Kepler, went up with a crew of two Englishmen, a Norwegian, and a Portuguese air force captain on board. Modeled on the Apollo 8 lunar mission of 1968, Kepler 1’s objective was to successfully orbit the moon and then return home. This it did with admirable precision-- and in the process it also sent back spectacular pictures of the lunar surface the likes of which Earth-bound viewers hadn’t seen since the heyday of the Apollo program. These pictures soon sparked a renewal by NASA officials in returning to the Moon, and although concerns among the Reagan Administration’s top budget officials at the time over the U.S. federal deficit precluded any resumption of manned lunar missions Congress did give NASA the green light in early 1988 for at least two unmanned lunar probes.

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    In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was about to come down and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was facing growing hostility to his regime, a joint announcement from the British and French governments signaled to the world the end of an era in spaceflight. The Hermes launch vehicle, which for over a decade had been the workhorse first of Project Hermes and then of the European Space Agency, was to be retired from service in two years’ time. While many aerospace analysts had expected such a decision for months, it was still a major surprise when official word of the Hermes project’s termination finally came. The Hermes had been as much a part of European space history as the Apollo capsule was for the United States or the Soyuz spacecraft was for Russia; it was hard to imagine European spaceflight without Hermes.

     But the end of the Hermes didn’t mean the Shackleton would be carrying the burden of European manned spaceflight alone. Even as the announcement of the Hermes rocket’s impending retirement was going out around the world, aerospace engineers had already started work on the next generation of launch vehicles for the European Space Agency. One of the most notable such design concepts in this category was a four- man craft whose configuration showed some clear signs of having been influenced by the U.S. space shuttle. Christened the Archimedes after the legendary ancient Greek scientific pioneer, the new spaceplane was scheduled to become operational by 1991, right on time for the 30-year anniversary of the first Vostok and Mercury flights. Its unveiling was greeted with a certain touch of envy in Moscow, where the Soviets’ top space officials had been attempting for years without much luck to get a Russian equivalent to the space shuttle off the ground.

    As it turned out the Archimedes’ maiden voyage would be delayed until 1993, by which time the Russian shuttle project had long since been canceled and calls were growing for the American shuttle to be retired from service. Its operational life would be a relatively short one, marked primarily by delays in production of the operational types and a near-tragedy during the prototype’s first test flight. There was also a scandal involving the CEO of a subcontractor to one of the main manufacturers of the spaceplane’s navigation systems. In 1995, a short two years after the Archimedes was first introduced, the embarrassed British and French governments jointly decided to pull the plug on the troubled design.

    The following year the European Space Agency went back to the drawing board and came up with a considerably more successful next- generation launch vehicle, the Huygens. Incorporating the lessons learned from the Archimedes fiasco, Huygens made its debut in 1998 and has been the primary manned spacecraft for the ESA ever since; it’s also extensively utilized by the space agencies of many Asian countries, and there are even some people in NASA who advocate it as a replacement for the space shuttle fleet(although the current presidential administration has yet to make a definitive decision on the matter). Russian aerospace engineers are using the Huygens as a template for their own next generation spaceplane concepts, and even the Chinese government has taken a casual interest in it.

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     Of course, the beginning of a new century has brought its share of challenges to the European Space Agency. The growing debate over climate change has prompted some critics of the massive expenditures involved in keeping the ESA running to suggest that might it be time for the agency to be sharply reduced or even dismantled altogether. Conversely, the agency’s defenders assert it is precisely because of climate change that the ESA should be allowed to maintain its current size and form; their primary contention is that the agency’s work is critical to monitoring environmental problems around the world as well as supporting research & development in the area of renewable energy.

     Operational security is also a major concern for the ESA. Since 2007 there have been at least twenty-one separate instances in which the agency’s computer networks have been hacked, with at least two of those hacks suspected to have been carried out by Chinese intelligence agents; there have also been threats from al-Qaeda splinter groups to attack ESA-owned research facilities in North Africa and in the Middle East. There are even allegations that certain Internet activist groups are trying to illegally extract classified date from the British and French defense ministries in an attempt to validate the assertion by a notorious conspiracy theorist that the ESA is merely a front for an ongoing covert space weapons development project. And last but hardly least, some NASA officials have anonymously grumbled that the ESA has siphoned off expert aerospace personnel from the American agency’s own ranks at a time when NASA can ill afford the drain.

    In spite of everything, however, the ESA continues to pursue its long-standing mission of making the European Union a major player in the field of space exploration. What started as a modest co-operation pact between Great Britain and France has grown into the second largest public space agency in the entire world, and there is every indication it will continue to play a significant role in space science during the coming decades.