Beside its Headquarters, the European Space Agency has a number of establishments (ESTEC, ESOC, ESRIN and EAC), as well as a launch base at Kourou in French Guiana, liaison offices in Washington and Moscow, and an office in Brussels for relations with the European Commission.
The European Space Agency has its headquarters in Paris, where the Director General's Office is situated and where the Agency's Council meets, together with the various committees. Headquarters also houses the various programme directorates and administrative services, with a staff of almost 350.
Sited at Noordwijk in the Netherlands, the European Space Research and Technology Centre ESTEC is the biggest of the Agency's establishments. ESTEC- a real nerve centre for the Agency's activities- is responsible for the technical preparation and management of ESA space projects, the development of which is entrusted to the European space industry. The centre, which employs approximately 1075 ESA staff, provides technical support to ESA's ongoing automatic satellite and manned space project activities as well as to Europe's space industry through its specialised manpower and laboratory facilities in all major technical space disciplines. It is also the home of ESA's Space Science Department which provides the essential link between ESA and the "outside" scientists whose instruments and experiments are flown on ESA spacecraft. ESTEC is also in charge of defining the scientific and application satellite programmes of the future and developing the new technologies needed for their realisation. The centre's comprehensive suite of environmental test facilities, which count amongst the largest and best performing in the world, permit the testing of major spacecraft components up to full Ariane-4 and Ariane-5 class spacecraft.
The European Space Operations Centre at Darmstadt in Germany ensures the smooth working of
spacecraft already in orbit. The tracking of satellites, from the time they are launched and throughout their mission in orbit, is done form ESOC's control rooms and through its nine ground stations all over the world, from which the commands for manoeuvring the spacecraft and carrying out payload operations are transmitted.ESOC receives and processes the signals coming from the spacecraft (scientific data, weather information, images of the Earth and communication links). The teams at ESOC, numbering around 270, are also involved in project studies for the ground segments of ESA's various programmes.
Although ESRIN's main task is still firmly linked to the Agency's Earth Observation programme, especially since the launches of the successful ERS-1 and ERS-2 missions in 1991 and 1995 respectively, this establishment is now also in charge of all the Agency's corporate informatics applications, and associated infrastructures.
Located in Frascati, south of Rome (Italy), and with an international staff of 140, ESRIN is ESA's "window to the user" thanks to the unique aspects of its activities.
These include on one side continuous contacts with the remote-sensing user community, the development of on-line catalogues and directories, help and order desk activities, training courses, etc. On the informatics side, it means contacts with the various ESA "users" for the organization of corporate information systems, some open to the external world, and for project-specific tools and applications.
The European Astronaut Centre, at Cologne in Germany, has the task of selecting and training the men and women who in a few years' time will be taking part in missions on board the Columbus laboratory attached to the International Space Station. To prepare for this, they are involved in space flights on the American Space Shuttle and the Russian space station Mir.
Kourou, in French Guiana, was chosen in part because it was close to the equator; this makes the site ideal for launching satellites. Following the first firing of a Diamant rocket by the French Space Agency, CNES, in 1970, Europe decided to use the Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG), in Kourou for its Europa launchers.
In 1975, ESA took over the existing European facilities at the Guiana Space Centre to build ELA-1 (the "Ensemble de Lancement Ariane"), or Ariane launch complex for its Ariane-1 launcher, soon to be followed by Ariane 2/3. For Ariane-4, and to step up the launch rate, ESA created ELA-2, which makes it possible to start assembling another launcher before the preceding one has even left its pad.
The adoption of the Ariane-5 programme brought the need for a new launch complex - ELA-3, with a different design that makes it far more flexible and simpler to use, while providing better safety.
The ELA-3 facilities, spread over 21km, have been used for qualification tests on various elements of the Ariane-5 launcher since 1993 and are now fully operational for regular Ariane-5 launches.
"Europe's Spaceport" covers 96 000 hectares and has a workforce of 1300.