The European Space Agency (ESA) is urging its members to support a program that will allow it to send astronauts to space autonomously and set long-term human exploration goals.

While Europeans have been travelling to space since the 1970s, only three countries have been able to launch astronauts into space on their own: the Soviet Union (now Russia), the United States, and China.

However, if ESA's leader and astronauts have their way, this might change, as Europe seeks to both seize new opportunities and avoid falling farther behind.

"Why should Europe be excluded from the group of countries that master human spaceflight on their own? Shall we take the risk that Europe is bypassed by more and more countries in developing the next strategic and economic zones, outer space?" ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said during a speech at the European Space Summit in Toulouse, France, on Feb. 16. 

According to Aschbacher, the US and China have set clear political and scientific space goals and are working on plans to achieve them. Europe could follow suit. By 2035, he believes, Europeans may be walking on the moon, with a trip to Mars on the horizon.

Following a speech by French President Emmanuel Macron earlier on Feb. 16 that asked for a study of the potential for a European human spaceflight program, Aschbacher is now forming a high-level advisory committee on human space exploration as part of a broader "European Ambition for Space."

ESA's astronauts are on board. On that same day, they published a "European Astronauts' Manifesto," which both calls to an innate drive of humans to explore and warns of "repeating the mistakes of the past in other strategic domains, which left us dependent on external players for our energy requirements or information technology development."

Europe remains a world leader in fields such as Earth observation, navigation, and space science, according to the declaration, but it is "lagging in the increasingly strategic domains of space transportation and exploration."

According to Frank De Winne, chief of ESA's European Astronaut Center, the initial steps toward acquiring autonomous human spaceflight capabilities will be political, followed by technical.

"It's first of all the political question that we need to answer," De Winne said at the International Symposium on Outlook and Cooperation on Near-Earth Orbit Human Space Flight on Feb. 17, referring to securing support from ESA's 22 member states. "We hope to have that answer by the end of the year."

Late this year, the ESA will have its once-every-three-years ministerial meeting, at which member states will decide which programs to implement and how much to fund them. If the agency receives political support, it can move on with working out the details.

"Which launcher we will use is not decided. Should it be an Ariane 6 [or] should we do something different like also our colleagues in NASA have done with SpaceX or with other companies?" De Winne said. 

Arianespace, which manufactures Ariane rockets, leads Europe's current launch capability. However, a number of firms are working on miniature rockets that might be sent into orbit as early as this year. Matthias Maurer, an ESA astronaut, arrived at the International Space Station in November on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

The human spaceflight aspiration is one of two "inspirators" and three "accelerators" adopted in the 2021 "Matosinhos Manifesto" to advance the use of space in Europe. The stated objectives include addressing Europe's and its citizens' urgent and unprecedented societal, economic, and security challenges.

Europe has previously experimented with human spaceflight. The French space agency CNES, for example, began research on the Hermes space plane in the early 1980s, which would have launched using the Ariane 5 rocket. However, the project was shelved in 1992 because to multiple delays, cost and performance difficulties, and no spacecraft was built.

Important issues of European crewed flying are now being researched. The Guiana Space Center, Europe's spaceport in French Guiana, was the subject of a study presented at the 2021 Global Space Exploration Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, that looked at ways to make it fit for human spaceflight.

Meanwhile ESA's astronauts are waiting. "All we need is the support of decision-makers: give ESA the mandate to develop an ambitious roadmap for Europe's future in space exploration, let us achieve together what once was 'impossible!'" their manifesto states. "The time to set sail is now."