But you are right, maybe written mainstream media hasn't said it enough. So, I'm going to share more articles on the subject. This is something about we Europeans should be proud. We need to know more about our own capabilities and strength.

https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=352811

You may enjoy this cartoon

I never thought he was serious.

As for the Child King, I still can't believe anyone signed up to the ludicrous HLS concept. 10-20 Starship launches to fuel another Starship depot in LEO, then transferring that to the actual lunar lander?

There's an awful lot of difficult work to be done to prove that the single HLS Starship can be refuelled in LEO by a whole fleet of other tanker & depot Starships (somewhere between 10 & 20!!) as is required.

Truly, the concept is utterly bananas & I don't know how / why anyone ever signed up to it.

I mean, Apollo was *far* simpler more than fifty years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

If & when a European flies on Artemis, that should change, but even then, as we know, ESA astronauts are generally only well-known in their home country.

Now if we can just purge the white supremacists out of our government...

Whether ESA will get its promised lunar astronauts (in principle the first should be German) & what happens to ESM-5 & 6, I don't know.

Which is a problem for NASA, inasmuch as the association between the tropes of human destiny in space & fascism are probably even stronger now in the public eye than it was in Von Braun’s heyday.

But perhaps even more so for ESA, if the next move is to try to persuade people that an independent human spaceflight programme is the way forward.

I’ve been asked to do media around Artemis & have largely turned it down, because I have felt very conflicted about not wanting to give any succour to the current US govt. Missed opportunities to discuss the ESM as a result, of course.

And overall, ESA’s part is just lost in the noise of US flag-waving.

The power of a Nobel prize winner very adept at playing politics, to be sure, but good for science?

There’s also an element of truth in that it’s a bit of an insider club, with the same groups getting experiments approved all the time, partly because they already know the ropes & partly because they then sit on the committees deciding future strategy & experiments.

I haven't read the english AFP article, but I can tell you that BFM (main tv news) invited someone who spoke long about ESA's work on this mission (I can't remember his name but I'll try to find the video).

There's also other articles like the one from RFI (RAdio France Internationale), interview with Philippe Berthe :

Artemis II: «Sans le Module de service européen, la mission est impossible»
https://www.rfi.fr/fr/science/20260331-artemis-ii-sans-le-module-de-service-europ%C3%A9en-la-mission-est-impossible

What's puzzling to me is, that so little of what's done on the ISS ends up being discussed during lunch, or over the post seminar pizza. Whereas so much other research, often in very far removed fields tends to be brought up.
It's a quite remarkable situation: Crewed space flight is a very "popular" topic; almost everyone in the 1st and 2nd world knows about it and that "a lot of science" is happening there.

But among my earthbound researcher peers it's discussed very little.

I'm well aware of the experiments that are done on the ISS (or back in the day on the STS and Mir). Heck, a couple of years ago some hardware for a medical study went up to the ISS what was in part built (or rather modified from the commercial system) by colleagues of me (optical coherence tomography to investigate the eyesight problems astronauts develop in microgravity).

1/

https://wandering.shop/@cstross/116339668629978498

After all, didn’t the Tories propose a fully UK Crew Dragon flight, but to be paid privately, not by the govt? Shades of Project Juno.

Ask your golf friends whether they’d be willing to pay an extra few percent income tax to fund an independent European human spaceflight programme & a wider boost to education, universities, government R&D, tech incubation, & science needed to support, justify, & benefit from such a programme.

I suspect you know the answer already

But it didn’t go anywhere in the end, perhaps underlining my point about there continuing to be less appetite / desire / need for Europe to be autonomous in this regard.

Space bubbleers struggle to accept this, of course, saying it reflects poorly on Europe. But does it really?