Europe’s space agency has many big challenges including budget. The agency is facing tough competition from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Disabled astronaut will go to space for the first time in history (symbolic photo)
The European Space Agency is hoping to recruit and send the world’s first physically challenged astronaut to space. Several hundred disabled astronauts have already applied for it, ESA chief Joseph Eschbacher told Reuters news agency on Friday.
Ashbacher said the ongoing recruitment process for the 22-member space program has recently closed and 22,000 applications have been received during this period. He said that we want to launch a disabled astronaut which will be for the first time. However, I am also happy for ESA because it shows that this place is for everyone and that is what they want to convey.
Many big challenges before ESA
The European Space Agency faces stiff competition from tech-funded upstarts like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Amazon founder Bezos hopes to become the first person to go to space on his rocket next month. Ashbacher said that space is developing very fast and if we don’t catch this train we are left behind. There are many big challenges before the ESA. ESA’s budget of 7 billion euros is a third of that of NASA.
Also, seven or eight launches in a year by ESA is far less than 40 launches by the US. This year, the agency’s applications after job advertisements were nearly three times the 8,000 applications received a decade ago, and a quarter of them were women, up from just 15 per cent earlier. ESA has promised to develop technologies to ensure people with disabilities. These astronauts will go beyond the International Space Station.
ESA discovers third planet in star system
A few days ago it was reported that the exoplanet-hunting CHEOPS satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) has found a third planet in a star system that was previously believed to have only two planets. A large amount of water clouds are visible in the third planet discovered in the photobomb.
The star system Nu2 Lupi is located in the constellation of Lupus just 50 light-years from Earth, and previous observations had seen two planets orbiting it. The name of the star was A and the two planets were known as Planet B and Planet C. The new planet has been named ‘Planet D’.
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