European Space Research Organisation

The European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) was an international organisation founded by 10 European nations with the intention of jointly pursuing scientific research in space. It was founded in 1964. As an organisation ESRO was based on a previously existing international scientific institution, CERN. The ESRO convention, the organisations founding document outlines it as an entity exclusively devoted to scientific pursuits. This was the case for most of its lifetime but in the final years before the formation of ESA, the European Space Agency, ESRO began a programme in the field of telecommunications. Consequently, ESA is not a mainly pure science focused entity but concentrates on telecommunications, earth observation and other application motivated activities. ESRO was merged with ELDO in 1975 to form the European Space Agency.

Foundation

European Preparatory Commission for Space Research

The origins of a joint European space effort are generally traced back to a number of initiatives taken in 1959 and 1960 by a small group of scientists and science administrators, catalysed by two friends, physicists and scientific statesmen, the Italian Edoardo Amaldi and the Frenchman Pierre Victor Auger. Neither Amaldi nor Auger was a stranger to the cause of scientific collaboration on a European scale. Indeed, it was they who, in the early 1950s, were key actors in the process which led to the setting up of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The ten founding states were Belgium, Denmark, France, (Federal Republic of) Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the

United Kingdom. Two other countries which had participated in the early COPERS activities, Austria and Norway, decided not to join the new organisation but retained an observer status. The first

meeting of the Council opened in Paris three days later with Harrie Massey in the chair. Pierre Auger was appointed ESRO's first Director General.

Legislative arm

At the decision making level (the "Legislative" in the ESRO jargon), the supreme governing body was the council, made of delegations from its Member States. Each member state had one vote in the council, where it could be represented by not more than two delegates, one of whom was generally a scientist, the other an important national science administrator. One or more advisers were usually included national delegations. The main tasks of the council were to determine the Organisation's scientific, technical and administrative policy; to approve its programme and annual work plans; and to determine its level of resources both annually, and every third year for the subsequent three-year period. The council was advised by two subordinate bodies, the Administrative and Finance Committee (AFC) and the Scientific and Technical Committee (STC).

Executive arm

At the executive level, ESRO was managed by a Directorate based in Paris, including the Director General assisted by a Scientific Director, a Technical Director and a Head of Administration . The directors of ESRIN, ESDAC and ESLAB reported to the Scientific Director; the director of ESTEC, who had also responsibility for ESRANGE and ESTRACK, reported to the Technical Director. The "Executive", as it was eventually called, was responsible for the implementation of approved programmes within the established financial envelope and under general control from the Scientific and Technical Committee. It was also called to perform feasibility studies of space missions proposals coming from the scientific community and recommended by the STC, in view of their eventual adoption in the programme.

The Bannier report and its consequences

Only two years after the formation of ESRO, problems with its structure became painfully obvious. By mid-1966 it had climbed to 50%, placing enormous pressure on the operational programme. For this reason the Council set up a group of experts led by J.H. Bannier to investigate and solve the problem. Bannier quickly relieved the pressure on the AFC by raising the limit below which the Executive could award contracts without having to seek committee approval. He further increased the role of the Executive by transferring certain competencies from the Legislative to the Directorate. But this was only a stop-gap measure.

Bannier realised that the entire structure of ESOC had to be changed. Firstly, they were emphatic that the executive function of the organisation should be clearly separated from the policy and the planning function. Secondly, as far as the scientific programme was concerned, they recommended that there be a clear institutional distinction drawn between spacecraft development and spacecraft operation after launch. To achieve these objectives, the Bannier group suggested that ESRO's top management structure be completely changed. The dichotomy between scientific and technical directorates was, in Bannier's view, wrong in principle for an organisation like ESRO. To overcome it, he suggested that the two posts be abolished. In its stead a new structure was proposed. It comprised the Director General (DG) plus four directors, two of whom were essentially responsible for policy-making and two for policy execution. A new post was to be created in the first category, a so-called Director of Programmes and Planning (DPP), whose task it would be to prepare draft programmes of the Organisation, based on the scientific, technical, financial and time implications of the different proposals. The second member of the directorate concerned with forward planning would be the Director of Administration (DA) whose task it would be to prepare policy on the future needs of personnel, finance and contracts, and to organise and implement the necessary procedures to maintain an a posteriori control over the Organisation's functioning. The two posts in the Directorate having executive authority would be filled by the director of ESTEC and of ESDAC, which was to be renamed ESOC, the European Space Operations Centre. As for ESRIN, the Bannier group judged its research to be marginal to the major activities of the Organisation. Its director, they felt, should not be a member of the directorate but should rather report directly to the DG.

Facilities and establishments

European Space Research and Technology Centre

thumb|Dutch newsreel including footage of [[European Space Research and Technology Centre|ESTEC]]

The European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) was to be a facility at the very core of ESRO. Its responsibilities included the engineering and testing of satellites and their payloads, the integration of scientific instruments in these payloads, and making arrangements for their launch. In some cases member states were to produce the scientific instruments for ESRO or produce them as part of their own national effort and compensate ESTEC for its service. In practise, national organisations simply used ESTEC as a service organisation and left it to pay for their efforts from the ESRO budget.

After the Bannier Report the facility gained overall executive authority for spacecraft development and was merged with ESLAB. The satellite control centre was also moved to ESOC. ESTEC was originally to be located in Delft (Holland) but because of unforeseen difficulties, Noordwijk was chosen instead.

ESLAB

The situation with ESRO's laboratory, ESLAB was similar. It lacked the staff to function as an independent organisation. But this wasn't surprising since the ESRO Convention describes ESLAB's role in the following manner: "...to undertake joint research programmes on the minimum scale deemed necessary by the Council [...] to complete or complement the scientific studies carried out in Member States."

ESTRACK and ESDAC

Space science data handling has two aspects. Firstly, it requires the setting up of a network of tracking and telemetry stations which can receive signals from spacecraft (ESTRACK). This network comprised four stations situated in the following locations:

Redu (Belgium)
Fairbanks (Alaska)
Spitsbergen (Norway)
Falkland Islands

Secondly, it requires a central facility which edits and processes the information from the tracking network. The facilities at the centre, initially labelled ESDAC (European Space Data Acquisition Centre), were essentially a large mainframe computer or computers, which wAS made available both to its in-house staff and to visiting scientists and fellows who wished to use them to analyse and study the recovered data. ESDAC was later renamed ESOC, the European Space Operations Centre. ESOC is located in Darmstadt (Germany). After the Bannier Report it gained overall executive authority for spacecraft operation. ESOC's director also became responsible for ESRANGE and for ESTRACK.

ESLAR

ESLAR, a laboratory for advanced research was created in 1966 mainly to break the political deadlock over the location of ESLAB. Later renamed ESRIN, and acronym for European Space Research Institute, ESLAR was based in Frascati (Italy). The ESRO Convention describes ESRINs' role in the following manner: "...to undertake laboratory and theoretical research in the basic physics and chemistry necessary to the understanding of past and the planning of future experiments in space."

: HEOS 2 was launched on 31. January 1972 from Vandenberg AFB with a Delta rocket. Instruments were a magnetometer, particle detectors and a dust detector replacing the barium cloud release cannister.

Thor-Delta programme

thumb|[[TD-1A was Europe's first 3-axis stabilized satellite]]

: Named after the workhorse medium launch system used by ESRO at the time, the Thor–Delta, the TD programme initially foresaw the launch of 3 satellites: TD-1, TD-2 and TD-3. TD-1 was devoted to stellar astronomy, TD-2 was to be devoted to solar astronomy while TD-3 was to study the ionosphere. Later TD-2 and 3 were merged to save funds. But subsequent financial difficulties and political disagreements led to the abandonment of the TD-2/TD-3 spacecraft. Later some of the experiments destined for launch aboard the TD-2/TD-3 were flown on the ESRO IV satellite.

LAS

: The Large Astronomical Satellite (LAS) was to be an orbiting observatory with the mission of providing basic knowledge about celestial objects through the use of a high-resolution ultraviolet spectrometer. The project started in the late 1950s and was cancelled in 1968 because of the lack of financial support and political squabbles.

Second generation satellites

COS-B

thumb|[[Cos-B, a satellite to study cosmic gamma-rays]]

: The first successful ESRO science satellite was COS-B. The mission was first proposed by the scientific community in the mid 1960s, approved in 1969 and launched in 1975. It was shut off in 1982 after contributing a great deal of scientific data on cosmic gamma rays, which continues to be analysed today. This was the first ESRO satellite which carried only one experiment.

GEOS

: GEOS was a geostationary multi-experiment satellite dedicated to magnetospheric research. The instruments for this project were provided by multiple European institutions. When GEOS was launched in 1977, the launcher malfunctioned and the planned orbit was not achieved. A modified qualification model of the same payload was successfully launched in 1978 and remained in operation until 1982 when it was turned off.

First package deal

This was the name of a policy shift negotiated by ESRO members in 1971 which drastically reduced scientific funding in favor of application activities doubling the overall budget. This first lead to a change in the administrative structure and a 50% reduction of the scientific staff. Given the new budgetary environment, LPAC had to choose which two missions to fly among the five which had been planned thus far. It eventually chose HELOS, renamed Exosat, and the IMP-D, renamed ISEE-2, projects.

Exosat

: The European X-ray Observatory Satellite (EXOSAT), originally named "HELOS", was operational from May 1983 until April 1986 and in that time made 1780 observations in the X-ray band of most classes of astronomical objects.

ISEE-2

: This satellite was the second of three International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE) spacecraft. The project was a cooperative effort between NASA and ESRO (later ESA) designed to study the interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. The program used three spacecraft, a mother/daughter pair (ISEE-1 and ISEE-2) and a heliocentric spacecraft (ISEE-3, later renamed International Cometary Explorer). The instruments on board ISEE-2 were designed to measure electric and magnetic field properties. ISEE-2 was launched in October 1977, and re-entered in September 1987. ISEE-1 (a.k.a. Explorer 56) and ISEE-3 were built by NASA, while ISEE-2 was by ESA. The space probes had complementary instruments supported by the same group of over 100 scientists. At least 32 institutions were involved, and the focus was on understanding magnetic fields.