MY EARLIER POST hoping that Britain would come up with support for the important European GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) initiative appears to have been an answered prayer. In previous funding rounds, the UK had committed to only 5% of the costs of GMES, which seemed way out of line with Britain’s economic clout and engagement with climate prediction.
BBC News science reporter Jonathan Amos has posted a report that Lord Drayson committed 102m euros (£86m) to GMES, at this week’s meeting of space ministers convened by Esa, the European Space Agency. This amount appears to have been cannily calculated to ensure that British space firms will still be considered in the bidding to build the next generation of European meteorological and earth-monitoring satellites, the ‘Sentinel’ series.
Britain is also to benefit from an Esa plan to open a space science research centre in Britain, based at the Harwell innovation campus in Oxfordshire. The focus of research at the new Harwell centre is still uncertain, but is likely to include a robotics component in line with British involvement in the Exomars next-generation Mars exploration programme.
