European Space Agency
| European Space Agency | |
| Established | 1975 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Paris, France, Earth |
| Primary spaceport | Guiana Space Centre |
| Website | www.esa.int |
History
The European Space Agency(ESA) was established in 1975 as a merger of the former European Launch Development Organization (ELDO) and the precursor of the European Space Agency, the European Space Research Organization (ESRO). Despite its name ESA is no agency or body of the European Union, but most of the member states of ESA are members of the EU too.
The first ESA missions were done purely with US launch systems because ESA had no launch capacity of its own in 1975. ESA and NASA joined in a large number of research projects, including a few ESA sponsored space shuttle missions with the European Spacelab on board.
In 1979 ESA started its first self-developed and -built launcher system, the Ariane 1. In the next 30 years ESA launched nearly 200 commercial and scientific payloads, with only 11 full or partial failures. The Ariane 4 was considered the most reliable space launch system before waved spacecrafts appeared in 2007.
Since the end of the Cold War ESA started a cooperation program with Roscosmos, the space agency of the Russian Federation. This cooperation included spaceflights to the MIR space station, joined research programs and sharing launch facilities.
Since 1998 ESA was part of the international community that built and maintained the International Space Station until the station was sold to the Artemis Foundation. ESA and its member states built multi modules for the ISS.
In 2003 the ESA launched the SMART-1 probe, an ion drive equipped research satellite that arrived in an orbit around Earths moon in mid 2005. Smart one was crashed into the moon in September 2006 for scientific purposes.
History (post wave)
When the first batches of Handwavium began to appear in small laboratories scientists did not recognized that they held the key to a new age of space exploration. When Fen were starting to lift of into space ESA was in shock as most other space agencies. Not being a direct agency of a government or the EU saved ESA from being shut down in the wake of the Professors “Reign of Terror” in the winter 2007. Before the member states of ESA could agree on new rules “to prevent misuse of dangerous substances in European spaceflight” several governments had already begun clandestine programs involving handwavium to apprehend The Professor, at great expense. Many of their representatives were forced to resign when this was revealed before this new direction was forced upon the ESA. Others were put into jail for redirecting huge amounts of state owned money for an illegal bounty against The Professor.
With the availability of cheap surface to orbit lifts by Fen contractors ESA stopped further development on the Ariane launcher system in 2009 and started to focus on improved hardtech systems for space probes and satellites. The last scientific mission done by an Ariane 5 launcher was the Herschel Space Observatory at Lagrange point 2. ESA stayed a pure hardtech space organization, denying all rumors about secret experiments with Handwavium.
In 2010 ESA bought SR-06 from the Rockhounds and converted the asteroids interior into a satellite maintenance depot. The ability to repair commercial asteroids in a zero-g facilty in orbit helped ESA a lot to maintain their ties with a lot of commercial satellite companies. ESA has contracts with several owners of large waved trucks to move satellites between their depot and the satellites orbit.
It is known that supporters of ESA supplied them with a copy of the first released “Whole Fenspace Catalog” after Serenity-Con, which ESA considers a blueprint to restart hardtech exploration of space. Its known that ESA has been upgrading the life support system on SR-06 several times since this.
When the Soviet Air Force announced the founding of EXFOR in 2013, ESA sponsored several scientific instruments and researchers for the Delta Pavonis expedition. Since then, ESA tried to become a permanent part of the Soviets space expeditions.
In late 2014 ESA announced that they would start testing a new generation of ion drives early 2015 to “open the solar system for cheap scientific research”. In addition to this they are lobbying their members for the necessary money to develop and build a space lift near Guiana Space Centre at Kourou in 2020.
