“For us, a further delay is no option,” said Wӧrner. “We have the TGO [Trace Gas Orbiter that reached Mars on October], an orbiter at Mars, we know also that the relay function is working as well. We are confident that the money and the schedule is mature.”

Alvaro Giménez Cañete, Director of Science, added “With the approval of the level of resources in particular for the science programme, we can do what we are committed to and we can launch the missions we planned to launch in the period from now to 2021 – that five year period.”

But he confirmed that if the 1% increase turns out to be a cut in real terms, it will have an impact and may require some cutting of costs.

“It has an effect for new commitments, missions that were not thought to be launched in the period but that we have to start. If we have to delay some starts or have some discussions about efficiencies applied to parts of the science programme where we can still improve, we have that challenge and we will go into that in discussion with all our Member States.”

Among these future missions is the L3 launch slot under the Cosmic Vision programme. The mission call was released this fall ahead of schedule in the hope of having a gravitational wave detector launched in 2029 – five years before the slot originally envisaged by the programme. The mission gained new impetus following the announcement of the direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo consortium on the ground, and the successful demonstration of necessary technology by the LISA Pathfinder mission in space. A decrease in spending would likely impact its development, but this might be mitigated if NASA becomes involved. The US space agency left the LISA project five years ago, but this year indicated its intention of adding the L3 gravitational wave mission to its 2020 Decadal Survey.