ESA

ESA (the European Space Agency; French: Agence spatiale europeenne) is an intergovernmental space agency headquartered in Paris, founded in 1975. Its purpose is to provide for and promote - for exclusively peaceful purposes - cooperation among European states in space research, technology and their applications. Per Wikipedia, ESA has 23 member states (as of 2026), employs about 3,000 people, and its 2026 budget is around EUR 8.26 billion. Its Director-General is Josef Aschbacher. ESA operates Europe's launch vehicles (Ariane 6, Vega-C) flying from the Kourou spaceport (French Guiana), Earth-observation programmes (Copernicus), satellite navigation (Galileo), participation in the International Space Station, and space-exploration missions (including Mars Express, JUICE, and the JWST and Euclid telescopes). Its key centres include ESOC (Darmstadt), ESTEC (Noordwijk), the European Astronaut Centre (Cologne) and the Kourou spaceport. The agency generates and processes vast amounts of data (especially from Earth observation) and increasingly applies artificial intelligence and robotics in space exploration and satellite-data analysis.