ESA

ESA, the European Space Agency, is an intergovernmental organisation established in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, France. It is funded by 23 member states and runs launcher, science, Earth observation and human spaceflight programmes on their behalf, contracting most hardware to European industry.

Uncrewed spaceplanes

Two ESA vehicles in this catalog fly without a crew. The Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle, or IXV, was a lifting-body re-entry demonstrator launched on a Vega rocket from French Guiana in February 2015. It climbed to roughly 412 kilometres, re-entered at about 7.5 kilometres per second, flew more than 7,300 kilometres down range and splashed down in the Pacific under parachutes after a mission of about 100 minutes. ESA describes it as the first lifting body to complete a full atmospheric re-entry from orbital speed.

Space Rider is the follow-on programme and inherits IXV's thermal protection and aerodynamic control work. ESA describes it as an uncrewed robotic laboratory about the size of two minivans, launched on Vega-C, that stays in low orbit for around two months carrying experiments in pharmaceutics, biomedicine, biology and physical science, then lands on a runway so its payloads can be unloaded and the vehicle refurbished for another flight.

Current position

Space Rider remains in development with European industrial partners; IXV completed its single flight and is retired.