Two Organisations

The European Space Agency did not start as one organisation. It grew out of two separate bodies created in the early 1960s, one that did well and one that failed, and it was shaped by a hard bargain among governments in 1973. This chapter follows that story: the postwar background, the science organisation, the launcher organisation, the reasons for its collapse and the compromise that produced ESA. The outline is widely agreed, but dates and membership lists vary between sources, so the chapter flags what should be checked.

The Background

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, and by the end of the 1960s the United States had landed people on the Moon. Western Europe had strong scientists and an industrial base, but its countries were small compared with the two superpowers, and each spending its own money on space would have meant doing little. There was also a model to follow: CERN, the European nuclear research organisation founded in the 1950s, had shown that European governments could share the cost of an expensive scientific facility. Scientists argued that space science should be organised in the same way.

Two Bodies, Two Jobs

In the early 1960s two European organisations were set up, with different jobs and different members.

ESRO: A Quiet Success

ESRO built and launched scientific satellites and set up the technical centres that ESA still uses, including the research and technology centre at Noordwijk in the Netherlands and the operations centre at Darmstadt in Germany. It had no rocket of its own, so its satellites were launched by other countries' rockets, mainly American ones. It ran into disputes about money and about how much should be spent, but it produced working science missions and built a body of European expertise. In that sense it was the more successful of the two bodies.

ELDO: A Rocket That Would Not Fly

ELDO was meant to give Europe its own launcher, a rocket named Europa. It was assembled in stages from parts supplied by different countries. The first stage came from Britain, a missile design that had lost its military purpose, the second from France and the third from West Germany, with other countries supplying further parts. The idea of reusing a cancelled missile as a launcher was practical, but joining stages built in different countries was hard, and the launch tests failed repeatedly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Each country managed its own part, and no one had the authority to hold the whole project together.

The British story has a side note. Britain developed and flew its own small satellite launcher, Black Arrow, and launched a satellite named Prospero into orbit in 1971 from the Woomera range in Australia. It remains the only British satellite launched by a British rocket (check the details). The programme was then cancelled, which shows how uncertain national support for space was at the time.

The Bargain of 1973

By the early 1970s Europe had a working science organisation, a failed launcher project and a worry that it would depend on the United States for access to space. In 1973 European ministers met and reached a package agreement, often described as a compromise among the three largest space powers in Europe.

• France would lead the development of a new launcher, which became Ariane (Chapter 4), and would pay a large share of the cost.
• West Germany would lead the development of a space laboratory to fly in the American Space Shuttle, which became Spacelab (Chapter 7).
• The United Kingdom would lead a telecommunications satellite programme (this part was later changed, and the details should be checked).

The deal worked because each major country got something it wanted, and the key change from ELDO was that one country, France, took the lead on the launcher.

ESA Is Born

The two earlier bodies were merged into a single agency. The ESA Convention was opened for signature in 1975, and the agency is generally dated from then, though the convention itself took until 1980 to enter into force (check both dates). ESA began with a group of ten or eleven founding states, including the UK, France, West Germany and Italy, and set its headquarters in Paris. Having science, launchers and applications under one roof, with a single management structure, was the answer to the problem that had sunk ELDO.

Exercises

Next chapter: How ESA Works, which looks at members, money and the "fair return" rule.