The
European Space Agency (
ESA), established in 1975, is an
intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the
exploration of space, currently with 17 member states. Headquartered in
Paris, ESA has a staff of close to 2,000 with an annual budget of about €2.9 billion in 2007.
ESA's main spaceport is the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, a site made available by France. It is close to the equator, hence commercially important orbits are easier to access. ESA became the market leader in commercial space launches in the 1990s. In recent years, ESA has also 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 Astronaut 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 1950s boom made it possible for Western European countries to invest in research and specifically in space related activities, Western European scientists realised solely national projects would not be able to compete with the two main 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).
