- published: 11 Nov 2013
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The European Space Agency (ESA) (French: l' Agence spatiale européenne) (ASE), established in 1975, is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 19 member states. Headquartered in Paris, ESA has a staff of more than 2,000 with an annual budget of about €4.02 billion / US$5.38 billion (2012).
ESA's space flight program includes human spaceflight, mainly through the participation in the International Space Station program, the launch and operations of unmanned exploration missions to other planets and the Moon, Earth observation, science, telecommunication as well as maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, French Guiana, and designing launch vehicles. The main European launch vehicle Ariane 5 is operated through Arianespace with ESA sharing in the costs of launching and further developing this launch vehicle.
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, the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) that trains astronauts for future missions is situated in Cologne, Germany, and the European Space Astronomy Centre is located in Villanueva de la Cañada, Spain.
This is a list of government agencies engaged in activities related to outer space and space exploration.
The name given is the English version, with the native language version below. The acronym given is the most common acronym: this can either be the acronym of the English version (e.g. JAXA), or the acronym in the native language. Where there are multiple acronyms in common use, the English one is given first.
The date of the founding of the space agency is the date of first operations where possible. If the space agency is no longer running, then the date when it was terminated (i.e. the last day of operations) is given. A link to the Agency's primary website is also given.
The capabilities of the space agencies are color-coded as follows:
The annual budgets listed are the official budgets for national space agencies available in public domain. The budgets are not normalized to the expenses of space research in different countries, i.e. higher budget does not necessarily mean more activity or better performance in space exploration. For European contributors to ESA, the national budgets shown are separate from their contributions to ESA.