European Space Agency and Airbus sign on to Orion mission

The European Space Agency and Airbus have been contracted to build a service module for NASA's Orion mission. The service module will be affixed to the crew module and will help propel Orion through space, as well as carry food, water and provisions for onboard astronauts.

Officials from NASA, ESA, the German space agency and Airbus gathered in Berlin this week to put their signatures on a contract valued at roughly $490 million. NASA will not actually fork over any cash for the completion of Orion's back end, but will accept the service caboose as payment for future ISS service costs incurred by Europe.

The module will borrow much of its design and technology from the unmanned cargo truck, known as the Automated Transfer Vehicle, that Europe has been using to taxi equipment to the space station and back. Airbus insists they and the Europeans wouldn't have been recruited to complete the Orion work without the ATV in their portfolio.

"The service module is a key element of the Orion vehicle. In fact, we talk about the crew module and the service module making up the Orion vehicle," Kirk Shireman, the deputy director of Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told BBC News.

The module will be built in Berlin and is expected to be ready for Orion's 2017 test flight. Orion is scheduled to take a brief unmanned test flight on December 4. The long-term plan is for NASA's spacecraft to deliver astronauts to an asteroid, Mars and deep space targets beyond.

The ESA hopes their early partnership will allow further cooperation down the road.

"It is of course my wish to have a European astronaut -- a man or a woman -- onboard the Orion capsule sometime in the next decade," Thomas Reiter, ESA's human spaceflight director, told the BBC. "I don't think it is too far-fetched to believe that with this path we have now opened, we will get flight opportunities."