Future ESA Projects

Abstract

The European Space Agency (ESA) is a truly international space organisation federating 14 Member States in Europe. In many respects ESA could indeed be identified as a European NASA. However, a more focussed image shows striking differences with the famous American agency. ESA is a much smaller agency than NASA: in 1997 its budget was about 2.5 billion ECU 1 roughly 3 billion US$ or a fraction 1/4 or 1/5 that of NASA. Its scientific budget is 350 million ECUs and that of NASA for the same disciplines, 2.1 billion US$. The overall staff of ESA totals 1800 employees, as compared with the many tens of thousands of NASA employees. Furthermore, ESA is not the only space agency in Europe. The four big Member States (France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain) also possess their own space agencies. The French space agency CNES, in particular, is bigger than ESA in staff members. ESA encompasses two types of programmes: the mandatory programme which includes both the Science Programme and the Technology Research Programme, and optional programmes which govern the running of the following activities: Earth Observation, Telecommunications, the Ariane launcher, Manned Space Programmes including the European contributions to the International Space Station, and Microgravity (Figure 1). Apart from its Head Office which is located in Paris, ESA possesses several establishments (Figure 2) (ESTEC, ESOC, ESRIN, EAC), as well as a launch base in Kourou, French Guiana, and offices in Washington, Moscow and Brussels, and several science control centres in Europe and in the United States at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Goddard Space Flight Center where SOHO is operated. ESTEC (1075 employees), the technical centre, is located in Holland at Noordwijk near Amsterdam airport. ESOC (about 270 employees), the Centre for Satellite Tracking and Operations, is located at Darmstadt near Frankfurt in Germany.