ESA Delivers: 50 years booklet

13/06/2025
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Produced to mark ESA’s first half century, ESA Delivers: 50 Hallmark Achievements Across 50 Years presents key achievements of the agency over the last five decades – from landing on a comet to fostering Europe’s space industry, contributing a lab for the Space Shuttle to implementing the world’s most precise satellite navigation system. ESA Delivers is now available for download.

“Being an agency means taking action – that’s how the word is defined – to deliver results,” notes ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher in his introduction. “And through its actions ESA delivers results that are too big and ambitious for any single nation.”

Agency coordinator for the 50^th anniversary Kai-Uwe Schrogl notes: “The original idea for featuring 50 highlights from across the last half century came from our Director General. The challenge then became not what to put in, but what to leave out, because ESA has achieved such an enormously long list of remarkable milestones submitted by ESA’s Directorates following a call for contributions.

“The result is not only a collection of ‘top’ so much as real ‘hallmark’ achievements – including technical miracles, historic firsts plus some moments of pure inspiration – intended to give a flavour of the broad range of ESA activities, contributing to elevate the future of Europe each and every day.”

In the ESA Delivers introduction, Director General Aschbacher asks readers to imagine a Europe without its space agency: the wider Universe would be a much dimmer, less known, place, our continent might possess few native astronauts or space scientists and our telecommunications, navigation and weather forecasting could well be dependent on foreign powers.

To think forward while looking back, the 50 achievements listed in ESA Delivers are grouped according to the five strategic goals of Strategy 2040, the agency’s vision for the next 15 years, treating these results as baselines to be built upon for the future.

Download and read the PDF version of the publication here

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