Dordain, who is director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), also said that plans to send an unmanned rover to Mars, which had been initially scheduled for launch in 2011 and then put back to 2013, would be postponed again, until 2016.

Ministers of ESA countries are due to meet in The Hague on November 25 and 26.

"I hope to secure (commitments of) at least nine billion euros," Dordain told aerospace journalists in Paris.

He said the international financial crisis that erupted in September was unlikely to affect spending plans, as "we work to a 10-year schedule" in the space industry.

ESA submits its spending blueprint to ministers every three years to support existing missions and take forward other plans that are in various stages of gestation, some of them in the distant future.

Spending plans include 1.4 billion euros for use of the International Space Station (ISS) from 2008 to 20012, and 340 million euros for the first phase of work to develop a second-stage cryogenic motor for the Ariane rocket by 2017.

The agency is also earmarking 850 million euros for the second phase of an EU-led Earth-monitoring system called Kopernikus, previously known as the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES).

A preliminary study, costing 30 million euros, will assess the feasibility of transforming ESA's space freighter, the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) -- which made a successful one-off maiden mission this year -- into a craft that can return cargo to Earth.

ESA's scientific programme, which has notched up glittering successes in observation of Mars, Venus and the Saturnian moon Titan, will be endowed with between 2.1 and 2.2 billion euros for the 2009-2013 period, an increase of 3.5 percent per year over the current allocation.

Dordain said, though, that the Martian rover ExoMars, which had previously been planned for launch in November 2013, would head to the Red Planet in early 2016.

Planning concerns made it preferable to aim for the next launch window for Mars, he said, insisting that there had not been budgetary problems.

The celestial ballet between Earth and Mars means that the distance between the two planets varies between 55 million kilometres (34 million miles) and more than 400 million kilometres.

The ExoMars mission entails sending a 200-kilogramme (440-pound) wheeled rover, which will carry a drill enabling it delve up to two metres (seven feet) below the surface to see if the Red Planet has microbial life, or the potential for it.

ExoMars was initially planned for launch in 2011, but this date had already slipped by two years to help resolve what its goals should be.

ESA's members are Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, while the Czech Republic is scheduled to join from next January 1.

Canada takes part in some projects under a cooperation agreement.

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