Ticket to space

As part of an international team, ESA will build humankind’s most remote research base in orbit round the Moon and send the first Europeans to the lunar surface. The ultimate goal is to send European to Mars in the 2050s.

Europe is also central to the most ambitious Mars mission planned so far – the first robotic round-trip to the surface of the red planet that will return a sample of Mars to be studied on Earth. The sample could help determine whether there was life on Mars.