§ Mr. Wilkinsonasked the Secretary of State for Education and Science whether he will list the space research projects which his Department sponsors both within the United Kingdom and with the European Space Agency; and how much is being spent on each of these in the financial year 1979–80.
£'000 £'000 (i) NATIONAL AND COLLABORATIVE MISSIONS Satellites in orbit— ARIEL V (United Kingdom satellite) … … … 30 ARIEL VI (United Kingdom satellite) … … … 354 IUE (international ultraviolet explorer) … … … 60 Satellite in preparation (in collaboration with NASA and the Netherlands)—IRAS (infra-red astronomy satellite) … 628 Studies of future projects … … … … … 61 Sounding rockets … … … … … … … 1,121 2,254 (ii) OTHER MISSIONS CARRYING UNITED KINGDOM EXPERIMENTS ESA mission— GEOS 1 ISEE-2 GEOS 2 EXOSAT ISPM NASA missions— SMM SPACELAB NIMBUS PIONEER VOYAGER ARIES COPERNICUS EINSTEIN OBSERVATORY These experiments are funded by research grants to universities by the Science Research Council (£1,512,000) and by expenditure in Science Research Council establishments (£274,000) 1,786 (iii) UNITED KINGDOM CONTRIBUTION TO THE ESA SCIENCE PROGRAMME 8,029 Total 12,069