Agence spatiale européenne
The European Space Agency (ESA) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to space exploration, with 22 member states. Founded in 1975, ESA shapes Europe's space capabilities, ensuring investments in space deliver benefits to European citizens, working across the entire space sector. ESA develops and operates Earth observation, navigation, telecommunications, and astronomy satellites and sends probes to explore the solar system, partnering with agencies like NASA, JAXA and commercial partners like Airbus. Key programs include the development of launch vehicles like Ariane and Vega, the Galileo satellite navigation system, and missions like Rosetta and BepiColombo.
All verified mentions of this organization in source documents.
ELSA-M has been primarily funded privately by Astroscale and also received support from the UK Space Agency through the European Space Agency’s Connectivity and Secure Communications programme.
ESA member states backed the use of space for defense at the ministerial conference, and ESA received more than €1.2 billion in funds for defensive projects.
ELSA-M is supported by the UK Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and Eutelsat Group through the Sunrise Partnership Project.
ESA raised €22.3 billion at last year’s ministerial conference, the most money in its history.
Tyvak International, a subsidiary of Terran Orbital, won a cubesat contract with the European Space Agency.
Laurent Jaffart leads ESA’s Directorate for Resilience, Navigation and Connectivity.
ESA is evaluating IRIS² as a telecommunication backbone to provide services to satellites in different domains.
ESA will work on space situational awareness and space domain awareness to help anticipate threats.
Tyvak International will develop Farinella, a 6U CubeSat, for ESA’s RAMSES planetary defense mission to asteroid Apophis.
ESA’s RAMSES mission will study asteroid Apophis during its close approach to Earth on April 13, 2029.
Laurent Jaffart joined ESA in 2024 after working at Airbus on Eurofighter Typhoon and Link 16.
ESA plans to target response times of less than 30 minutes for Earth observation, PNT, and secure connectivity under its resilience work.
ESA will support the European Commission in defining the Space Shield concept.
ESA’s European Resilience from Space program is an integrated system of systems intended to address gaps in Europe’s strategic capabilities from space.
Space Rider is an uncrewed ESA vehicle planned to be launched on a Vega-C rocket and to land as a glider, but the Vega-C launch vehicle is expended during the mission so the overall system is not fully reusable.
The ESA public call restricts participation to small and medium-sized enterprises and startups, excluding large contractors.
ESA’s vision for an independent European outpost depends on the operational cadence and scale of the Ariane 6 heavy-lift rocket.
The ESA public call seeks at least two distinct design concepts for a completely reusable spaceplane system.
The European Space Agency is investigating building a sovereign European space station.
The feasibility assessment with Airbus Defense and Space is part of the RADICAL project within the European Space Agency’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) program.