Short answers, pulled from the story.
The European Space Agency is a 23-member international organisation devoted to space exploration, with headquarters in Paris and a staff of around 3,000 people globally as of 2025. It was founded in 1975 with the ESA Convention, when the earlier ESRO and ELDO organisations were merged.
The idea traces to 1958, when Edoardo Amaldi of Italy and Pierre Auger of France met to discuss founding a common Western European space agency, with scientific representatives from eight countries attending. The agency in its current form had ten founding member states, including Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
The European Space Agency launched Giotto in 1986 to study the comets Halley and Grigg-Skjellerup, and its Rosetta probe became the first spacecraft to orbit a comet in 2014, with its Philae lander performing the first comet landing. Its Huygens probe landed on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005, the farthest landing from Earth ever made.
The European Space Agency launches from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana. Equatorial launches there carry larger payloads and gain an extra push of nearly 500 metres per second from the Earth's faster rotation at the equator.
The Hermes mini-shuttle, designed from November 1987 to carry 3 to 5 astronauts on the Ariane 5, was cancelled in 1995 after about 3 billion dollars had been spent. The fall of the Soviet Union shifted the agency toward cooperation with Russia on a next-generation vehicle instead.
At the ministerial council in November 2025, the European Space Agency widened its mandate to include security and defence, funded new European launch vehicles, and approved a record budget of 22.1 billion euros. In early 2026 it established a new Resilience, Navigation, and Connectivity Directorate focused on security and defence technologies.