Abstract:

As from its very foundation in 1975, and as documented by its Convention, the mandate given by its Member States to the European Space Agency has been to “provide for and to promote, for exclusively peaceful purposes, co-operation among European States in Space Research and Technology and their space applications, with a view to their being used for scientific purposes and for operational space applications systems”. That double duality: “R&D but also Applications and Science but also Operations” went with an equally high level objective of Industrial Policy, that the Convention states to be designed in particular to “(…) improve the world-wide competitiveness of European Industry by maintaining and developing space technology and by encouraging the rationalisation and development of an industrial structure appropriate to market requirements (…)”. Born as a Procurement Agency implementing the Programmes of its Member States, ESA has gradually evolved to put its technical, management and, indeed, procurement skills also at the service of other realities and Organisations. On the global European Space governance level, this has taken the form of an evolving, reinforcing cooperation with and support to the European Union, acting through the European Commission in implementation of dedicated Delegation Agreements. With Copernicus, Egnos and Galileo as flagships models of such cooperation, but not limited to those, the part of the ESA budget that is contributed by the EU in 2020 was 22%.The lecture will review the role that ESA has assumed in support of the European Union, the forms that such ESA contribution has taken, and the trends that appear to mark its future evolution on the way to the fostering of a European Space Ecosystem.