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The European Space Agency (ESA) is an organization which has up to 2000 staff members, 17 member states and an annual budget of €2900 million.
ESA’s main spaceport is the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana.
ESA became the market leader in commercial space launches in the 90’s.
Recently, ESA has established itself as a major player in space exploration.
ESA science missions are based at ESTEC (Noordwijk, Netherlands), ESA earth observation missions at ESRIN (Frascati, Italy), ESA mission control ESOC (Darmstadt, Germany) and the ESA European astronaut centre EAC (Colonge, Germany).
ESA has almost completed its goal of having a complete fleet of launch vehicle in service.
ESA’s fleet will soon consist of three major rocket designs: Ariane 5, Soyuz and Vega.
The International Space Station (ISS) is a research station in space.