The European Space Agency said it has no plans to send European astronauts to China's newly completed Tiangong space station, making it clear that the agency is no longer committed to future cooperation with China in its manned space program.

(taken from Wikipedia)

[Instant News / Comprehensive Report] European Space Agency (ESA) Director Josef Aschbacher (Josef Aschbacher) said that there is no plan to send European astronauts to the newly completed Tiangong Space Station in China, which is the first time that the agency is no longer committed to the future Cooperate with China in the field of manned space program.

Aschbach said at a press conference held in Paris, France on the 23rd that ESA has no budget, no political permission and no intention to participate in the Chinese space station.

When he made the aforementioned remarks, the 22 member states of the European Space Agency had just approved a record budget of nearly 17 billion euros (about 570 billion Taiwan dollars) to support ESA's plans for the next three years.

Please read on...

Of this, about 5 percent of the funds will go to the International Space Station (ISS), of which ESA has been a member since the 1980s, responsible for 8.3 percent of its annual expenditure.

ESA and the China Manned Space Engineering Office signed an agreement in 2014 that took their partnership to a new level.

The Tiangong space station, which China completed in low-Earth orbit late last year, is one of the key areas of EU-China space cooperation.

In 2017, ESA sent two astronauts and Chinese astronauts to conduct a 9-day joint training in Yantai, Shandong Province, and claimed that the ultimate goal is to establish a long-term cooperative relationship with China and fly on the Chinese space station.

An anonymous space scientist in Beijing said the news, while unfortunate, was not entirely unexpected.

Over the past few years, cooperation between China and Europe has become increasingly difficult due to the Wuhan pneumonia (new coronavirus disease, COVID-19) and the situation in Ukraine.

The Tiangong space station is a modular space station system that China will start building in 2021. It is the third large-scale in-orbit building built by humans after the Russian Mir space station in 1986 and the US-Russian International Space Station in 1998. The space experiment platform is also the "third step" in the "three-step" development strategy of China's manned space flight project.

According to the plan, the Tiangong space station will enter the normal operation mode in 2023, and the payloads of international cooperation programs will also enter the space station to carry out experiments.