Space: EU not boldly going where no one has gone before

It wasn’t a long time ago, nor was it in a galaxy far, far away, when Jose Manuel Barroso said he wanted the European Union to play a role in space exploration, which may include human spaceflight as well as robotic missions.

"The Commission … will argue that space exploration is important to the EU", the Portuguese predecessor of Jean-Claude Juncker, the current European Commission chief, said in a speech in 2009, ...