ESA's space laboratory.

We have a new and very spectacular spacecraft, and, it must be said, I like it because I think the European Space Agency is finally getting its act together, I hope they accelerate the pace, and we are already living in times of competition of all against all and we must move forward because there are also races in all fields of technology, in this case space races. And the ship shown that we are seeing is a ship from the European Space Agency, it is an autonomous ship, in 2024 the American company Barda Space finally managed to bring to Earth a capsule with substances for medical use that had been manufactured by the first autonomous space factory, substances that are obtained in space with a much higher degree of purity than what would be achieved here on Earth. There are certain substances that can only be obtained in a situation of weightlessness or that can be obtained with an extreme degree of purity in or in the environments that space offers us, something that we cannot reproduce here on Earth or if we try to reproduce it it would be very expensive, we cannot reproduce the weightlessness thing unless you are constantly pulling the systems for manufacturing that substance from a tower, it would be crazy, but in space it can be done. That ship was a small module, it was a prototype, but it was the beginning of an enormous activity, an enormous economic activity, in the future there will be factories in space producing those substances that can only be produced there, the space industry to create drugs or special substances that can only be obtained in gravity in space, the ESA is developing this ship precisely for that, the Space Rider is going to be designed as a laboratory to manufacture drugs in microgravity.

It is a mixture of a mini space shuttle and a mini rocket, in fact, there is a part that is recoverable, that lands and another that is not recovered, it is an unmanned vehicle, but there is a very similar design that is being developed by a European company that would be manned and could take, for example, astronauts to the international space station, this one or the one that is built in the future, this ship that you are seeing would be in the testing phase, it is not just the animation shown in the video, there is already a structure built and they are testing with she. It will be launched in 2027, I hope they speed it up and things go faster, because we are really in a moment of competition, the European Space Agency has been too servile with respect to NASA and should have more independence, it should already have the capacity to send astronauts to space, it should be at the same level as China or the United States or Russia, Europe is economically like 10 times more powerful than Russia, even if we talk about the European Union we are still very divided. I really hope that they develop this ship because I also believe that the issue of the economy that is going to develop around the production of medical substances and other substances in space is going to be one of the economic drivers to strengthen everything that is the space race and we are in a space race and Europe has to have its autonomous capacity with respect to China, Russia or the United States and not be constantly dependent. Remember that all European astronauts are astronauts because they pay their ticket to Russia or the United States, if they would not be astronauts, they would only be astronauts in name, but they would never go to space because we do not have any spacecraft to send them to space, which for example the Chinese have and it is quite sad because we are talking about the European Space Agency.