Western European Space Science

In Europe space research began in the early 1960s, not long after the Soviet Union and the United States launched their first satellites. In the 1970s, after proceeding for many years at a rather leisurely pace, European nations stepped up their activity in space. Today the European Space Agency—a 13‐nation intergovernmental organization that is Europe's counterpart to NASA—is well known for its successes with geophysical, interplanetary, astrophysical and other scientific spacecraft, as well as for technological and commercial projects such as communications satellites and the Ariane launcher (and its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana). ESA and individual European nations have planned many scientific space projects for the next decade and have even laid out an ambitious, but reasonable and well‐grounded, plan for scientific projects beyond the year 2000. This article traces European space efforts from their beginnings a quarter of a century ago to their future in the next century, discussing not only the projects but also some of the intergovernmental politics that affect them. The discussion includes national programs (see figure 1) as well as those of ESA.