The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
As ESA engineers work together to design a future space mission, it takes virtual shape before them in three dimensions.
This 3D visualisation system is one of many state-of-the-art networking tools found in the Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
The CDF’s network of computers, multimedia devices and software tools allow experts from different engineering disciplines to work in close coordination, in the same place at the same time, to complete the most complex designs imaginable – in a matter of a few weeks rather than several months.
The CDF enables ‘concurrent engineering’ based on teamwork and focused on a common design model that evolves iteratively in real time as the different subsystem experts make their contributions. It has proved an influential approach over the CDF’s 15 years of operations, helping to inspire new ways of working for Europe’s hi-tech industries.