Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is a space scientist

who has taken on an intensely political managerial job here on Earth as Director General of the European

Space Agency. Austrian Yosef Ashbacher has to ensure that Europe has the ambition and the resources to make it a player in the next phase of the space race.

And right now, he is grappling with a major problem.

His agency's most important immediate projects, putting a rover on Mars, for example, have been thrown into disarray

thanks to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the suspension of space cooperation with Russia.

Europe's space program had become dangerously dependent on Russian rockets and know-how.

Now, the ESA needs to find a new strategy and fast.

But the challenge goes beyond turning away from cooperation with Russia. Space exploration is,

as ever, a reflection of global power politics. The US has long dominated. China is seeking to match America's

capabilities. There are fears that militarization, rather than exploration, will become the

dominant motivation for investment in space. And there's a new commercial impulse, too,

as tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos seek to profit

from space ventures. Amid all of this change, is Europe set to remain and also ran in the space race?

Well, Yosef Ashbacker joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Let's start where I started in that introduction, your relationship with Russia.

The war with Ukraine, the degree to which you've had to sever ties with the Russian Space Agency.

It's exposed a dangerous over-reliance on cooperation with Moscow.

It is true that with the invasion of Russia and Ukraine, it was a wake-up call for many of us,

on the energy sector, on many other parts, that we suddenly have a war in front of our doors,

and also in space.

And in space, what actually happened is exactly the same as in many other

...