The European Space Agency's UK centre at the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, working on climate, connectivity, navigation, exploration and helping UK space businesses grow.
ECSAT, the European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications, is the European Space Agency's base in the UK. It is on the Harwell Campus in Didcot, Oxfordshire, next to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Its teams work on resilience, navigation and connectivity, commercialisation, Earth observation and climate, exploration, and space technology engineering and quality. It hosts projects such as Moonlight, a planned system of satellites for communications and navigation around the Moon, and a 5G and 6G hub for next-generation connectivity.
ESA set up the Harwell site in 2009 to strengthen its partnership with the UK. Its purpose-built office, named after ESA's first Director General, Roy Gibson, opened on 9 July 2015. ESA says about 170 people work there and that seven ESA directorates are represented. Other parts of the site include the Vulcan Facility, which holds rock and dust samples from Earth that behave like those found on the Moon and Mars, and an advanced manufacturing laboratory run jointly with RAL Space that develops methods such as 3D printing and friction stir welding.
ESA does not give a formal mission statement for the UK site. Its own description of the site's role is to support ESA's aims: stronger resilience and secure connectivity, a stronger European space industry, action on climate change and progress in exploration. ESA also says the site's teams have helped over 1,000 companies use space to build products and services, and that the business incubation centre there has supported 140 start-ups since 2010.
The centre is part of the biggest space cluster in the UK. ESA says that cluster has more than 100 public and private organisations, including RAL Space, the Satellite Applications Catapult and the UK Space Agency. ECSAT also runs Spaceship ECSAT, a learning and innovation environment where students and early-career researchers work on exploration challenges, and its conference centre has hosted about 60 events since 2023. ESA held its first Open Day there in 2024. A ten-year development plan to expand the site and its workforce was under discussion with UK authorities.
The people at ECSAT include engineers, climate and Earth observation scientists, specialists in telecommunications and navigation, programme managers, people who support start-ups and businesses, and administrative and events teams. Many staff are international because ESA recruits across its member states, so the site has a mix of nationalities. Even if you will not work for ESA directly, its UK presence means a lot of space work goes on within a short distance. The ESA careers site is the place to check for vacancies.
Website: www.esa.int/About_Us/Welcome_to_ESA/ECSAT
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