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.............................. ESA European Space Agency
Logo and Trademark..............................
The European Space Agency (ESA), established in 1974, is an inter-governmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 17 member states. Its headquarters are in Paris. ESA has a staff (excluding sub-contractors and national space agencies) of about 1,900 with an annual budget of about €2.9 billion in 2007.
ESA's spaceport is the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, a site made available by France, close to the equator from which commercially important orbits are easier to access. During the 1990s ESA gained the position of market leader in commercial space launches and in recent years ESA has established itself as a major player in space exploration.
ESA science missions are based at ESTEC in Noordwijk, Netherlands, Earth Observation missions at ESRIN in Frascati, Italy, ESA Mission Control (ESOC) is in Darmstadt, Germany, and the European Astronauts Centre (EAC), that trains astronauts for future missions is situated in Cologne, Germany.
After the Second World War, many European scientists had left Western Europe in order to work either in the US or the Soviet Union. Although the booming recovering process of the 1950s made it possible for Western European countries to invest into research and specifically into space related activities, Western European scientists realised solely national projects would not be able to compete with the two major superpowers. In 1958, only months after the Sputnik shock, Edoardo Amaldi and Pierre Auger, two prominent members of the Western European scientific community at that time, met to discuss the foundation of a common Western European space agency. The meeting was attended by scientific representatives from eight countries, including Harrie Massey (UK).
The Western European nations decided to have two different agencies, one concerned to develop a launch system ELDO (European Launch Development Organisation) and the precursor of the European Space Agency, and ESRO (European Space Research Organisation) that was established on March 20, 1964 per an agreement signed on June 14, 1962. From 1968 to 1972 ESRO celebrated its first successes. Seven research satellites were brought into orbit, all by US launch systems.
The ESRO's successor organisation ESTEC (European Space Research and Technology Centre, based in Noordwijk, the Netherlands) is still a part of ESA, though ESA itself is a much bigger organisation today. The ESA in its current form was founded in 1974, when ESRO was merged with ELDO. The ESA was constituted of 10 founding members: Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. ESA launched its first major scientific mission in 1975, Cos-B, a space probe monitoring gamma-ray emissions in the universe.
Beginning in the 1970s, when the space race between the US and the Soviet Union had tuned down and space budgets were cut dramatically in both superpowers, ESA established itself as a forerunner in space exploration. ESA joined NASA and the UK in the IUE, the world's first high-orbit telescope, which was launched in 1978 and operated very successfully for 18 years. A number of successful Earth-orbit projects followed, and in 1986 ESA began Giotto, its first deep-space mission, to study the Comets Halley and Grigg-Skejllerup. Hipparcos, a star-mapping mission, was launched in 1989 and in the 1990s SOHO, Ulysses and the Hubble Space Telescope were all jointly carried out with NASA. Recent scientific missions in cooperation with NASA include the Cassini-Huygens space probe, to which ESA contributed by building the Titan landing module Huygens.
As the successor of the ELDO, ESA has also constructed rockets for unmanned scientific and commercial payloads. Ariane 1, launched in 1979, brought mostly-commercial payloads into orbit from 1984 onward. The next two developments of the Ariane rocket were intermediate stages in the development of a more advanced launch system, the Ariane 4, which operated between 1988 and 2003 and did establish ESA as the world leader in commercial space launches in the 1990s. Its successor, the Ariane 5 rocket, has established itself within the heavily competitive commercial space launch market after its first flight which ended in failure in 1997 and prospectively will reach 25 successful launches by 2006.
ESA has made great progress towards its goal of having a complete fleet of launch vehicles in service, competing in all sectors of the launch market. ESA's fleet will soon consist of three major rocket designs, Ariane 5, Soyuz and Vega. Rocket launches are carried out by Arianespace, a CNES subsidiary (a minority share is held by EADS as well), at ESA's spaceport in French Guiana. Because many communication satellites have equatorial orbits, launches from French Guiana are able to take larger payloads into space than from other northern spaceports. In addition equatorial launches give spacecrafts an extra 'push' of nearly 500 m/s due to the higher rotation velocity of someone standing on the equator than near the Earth's axis where rotation velocity approaches nil.
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