Space travel: When NASA decommissions Europa

For decades, the US space agency has worked closely with the Europeans. This era may now be coming to an end. Experts are advising ESA to make Europe more independent in space.

There's something of a tragicomic element to it: just over a week ago, ESA broadcast Johann Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz live from Vienna into space via satellite dish, in order to create a "musical bridge between humanity and the universe." This was also a tribute to Stanley Kubrick's classic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and due to the failure to immortalize this waltz on the data disk that the US space agency NASA launched into space in 1977 with the Voyager space probe as a message to extraterrestrial civilizations. On the very eve of this concert, which was also broadcast on a screen in New York's Bryant Park, NASA burned quite a few bridges to Europe with its proposed budget for 2026.