This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Space Agency (ESA). It has launched spectacularly successful missions, but is different to other space agencies, which generally represent one country. ESA is funded by 23 member states and also has cooperation agreements with nations such as Canada.
ESA operates cutting-edge spacecraft designed to monitor the Earth, as well as space telescopes that study the distant cosmos. It has launched robotic spacecraft to other planets and to objects such as comets. It is also involved in human spaceflight, training European astronauts to work on the International Space Station (ISS).
These are hugely successful achievements. But the agency now faces challenges as competition heats up among newer space powers such as China and India.
The history of ESA can be traced to events immediately after the Second World War, when many European scientists moved to either the US or the Soviet Union. Many of them realised that projects supported only by a single nation could not compete with those supported by the two big geopolitical players at the time.
This motivated the physicists Pierre Auger, from France, and Edoardo Amaldi, from Italy, to propose a European organisation that would carry out space research and would be “purely scientific”.
In 1962, two agencies were created. One of these, the European Launch Development Organisation (ELDO), would concentrate on developing a rocket. The other, the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), would focus on developing robotic spacecraft. Both were joined together in 1975 to form the European Space Agency.
The push to build a European rocket would eventually yield the Ariane launcher, which is operated by the French company Arianespace.
The first satellite to be launched under the banner of the newly formed European Space Agency was Cos-B. This spacecraft was designed to monitor a high energy form of radiation called gamma rays, being emitted from objects in space.
In 1978, ESA cooperated with NASA and the UK on the International Ultraviolet Explorer mission. This space telescope was designed to observe the cosmos in ultraviolet light, something that cannot be done from Earth.
The agency would later collaborate with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency on one of the most successful space telescopes of all time: Hubble. Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope helped confirm the expansion rate of the universe and showed that black holes are at the cores of almost all galaxies. Hubble’s stunning images also changed the way that many people saw the universe. ESA funded one of the original instruments on the space telescope, the Faint Object Camera, and provided the first two solar arrays.
The space agency is also a partner on the revolutionary James Webb Telescope, which launched in 2021. ESA contributed two of the telescope’s instruments: the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).
Solar System missions
ESA has also launched pioneering missions to other planets and objects in our solar system. The first of these was the Giotto comet explorer. This robotic spacecraft flew past Halley’s comet in 1986 and was successfully woken up in 1992 to study a comet called Grigg-Skejllerup.
A second successful cometary mission followed when the Rosetta spacecraft entered orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta dispatched a lander called Philae to touch down on the comet’s surface.
Rosetta has been my favourite of all ESA achievements, simply due to the pure audacity of attempting to land on an object whose shape and composition was until then only sparsely known. In order to “land” on an object with low gravity, Philae was to have deployed harpoons that would attach the lander to the surface. These systems did not work, but the overall mission was a success, leading to high levels of engagement from the public.
Besides comets, ESA launched one of the most successful missions to the Red Planet: Mars Express. The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in 2003 and has played a key role in enhancing understanding of our planetary neighbour. It is expected to continue working until at least 2034. Mars Express also carried the ill-fated British Beagle 2 spacecraft to Mars. This was supposed to land in 2003, but contact was never established with the probe, which is presumed to have been damaged while touching down.
In 2005, ESA’s Huygens spacecraft landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. This was the furthest from Earth that a spacecraft has ever landed. These are all outward-facing missions, but ESA has also had major success with projects to study what’s going on here on Earth. These include the Envisat satellite, which operated from 2002-2012, and the Sentinel series of spacecraft, which have operated from 2014 to the present.
These have helped map agriculture and forests, understand the Earth’s climate, track ice, and monitor atmospheric ozone. In addition, the Galileo navigation satellites are providing a high-precision alternative to GPS.
ESA is also a major player in human spaceflight, having been a partner in the International Space Station project since 1993. It has built sections of the ISS, including the Columbus laboratory, launched in 2008, and the Cupola viewing window, which gives astronauts panoramic views of Earth. The agency’s astronauts regularly spend time on the ISS as crew and could even fly to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis programme.
Since the 1990s, ESA has frequently collaborated with NASA – often very successfully. However, this relationship has also faced challenges. In the wake of the financial crisis, for example, NASA cancelled its participation in several collaborative missions with ESA. Under a proposed NASA budget this year, the US space agency may again cancel its involvement with the joint NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission.
ESA’s future
Times have changed in the space industry since ESA’s founding 50 years ago. Major countries such as China, India and Japan all have their own space programmes. ESA faces considerable financial pressures to compete with them.
Nevertheless, ESA is working on strengthening its space exploration and launch capabilities through the use of a commercial spaceport in Norway.
It has also put together a long-term strategy for 2040. This document highlights important areas where ESA can play a major role, including protecting Earth and its climate, continued missions to explore space and also efforts to boost European growth and competitiveness.
All this should strengthen and secure the agency for the future. Through a mixture of developing its own missions and collaborating with other agencies and commercial partners on others, ESA should be a major player in space exploration for decades to come.
- is a Lecturer in Astronomy, Nottingham Trent University
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
