The ESA Academy is born!

What is the ESA Academy?

The ESA Academy will provide a new perspective on the learning of space disciplines. It will be run in close collaboration with European universities and is designed to complement academic education. It will enhance the students’ educational experience and allow them to benefit from an unprecedented transfer of ESA’s practical and theoretical know-how. This will range from space sciences to engineering, spacecraft operations, product and quality assurance, project management and much more.

It will help university students become acquainted with the standard professional practices applied nowadays across the whole space sector, and better prepare them for the labour market. 

The two pillars of the ESA Academy

Officially launched in March 2016, ESA Academy brings together the ESA Education Programme elements for universities under two interconnected pillars of activity:  

• Hands-on Space Projects, a continuing programme that enables university students to gain first-hand, end-to-end experience of space-related projects. 
• Training and Learning Programme, an  initiative offering university students a portfolio of different training sessions and learning opportunities. 

In addition to providing access to existing ESA establishments and partners’ infrastructures, the ESA Academy will make use of new dedicated facilities located at ESA’s Redu Centre in Belgium. The Training and Learning Centre, will start courses in March this year, and the CubeSat Education Centre will become operational in 2017.   

Hands-on Space Projects

Since the mid-2000s, ESA has offered university students the opportunity to participate in real space-related projects. They range from scientific and technology-demonstration experiments to be run on a number of different professional platforms, to small satellite missions such as CubeSats to be launched in space.

The Hands-on Space Projects is coordinated through a number of thematic programmes:

• Fly Your Satellite!, the ESA CubeSat educational programme. cubesats@esa.int
• ESEO, the European Student Earth Orbiter, a microsatellite developed in collaboration with universities . eseo@esa.int
• Fly Your Thesis!, student experiments to be run in microgravity conditions on  three parabolic flights. flyyourthesis@esa.int
• Drop Your Thesis!, student experiments to be run in microgravity conditions using the ZARM Drop Tower. dropyourthesis@esa.int
• Spin Your Thesis!, student experiments to be run in hypergravity conditions using the ESA Large Diameter Centrifuge. spinyourthesis@esa.int
• REXUS/BEXUS, the German (DLR)/Swedish(SNSB) programme with ESA collaboration allowing student experiments to fly on sounding rockets and stratospheric balloons. rexus-bexus@esa.int

This set of exciting programmes grows and evolves over time to offer students access to more and more professional space facilities and opportunities. The ESA Academy Hands-on Space Projects is coordinated by the ESA Education Office at ESA’s ESTEC establishment in the Netherlands. 

The Training and Learning Programme

Newly established, the ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Programme offers a varied portfolio of courses given by space experts and professionals coming from all fields of ESA’s expertise, as well as from  space industry and academia.

The courses will be available to interested university students mainly engaged in  space-related studies. In particular, they will be available to the student teams participating in the ESA Academy’s Hands-on Space Projects, to complement their learning experience and to support them in the different phases of their projects.

The Training and Learning Programme is coordinated by the ESA Education Office from ESA’s Redu Centre in Belgium.  esa.academy@esa.int

Training facilities at the ESA Education Training Centre

In addition to providing access to existing ESA establishments and partners’ infrastructures, ESA Academy makes use of dedicated facilities located in the ESA Education Training Centre of ESA’s ESEC-Galaxia, in Transinne, Belgium:

• The Training and Learning Facility, consisting of a training room and an educational Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) where university students attend 4 to 5 day training sessions, complementary to their academic education. 

• The CubeSat Support Facility, consisting of a cleanroom equipped with an electrodynamic shaker, a thermal vacuum chamber and additional test equipment where students participating in the Fly Your Satellite! programme are guided in the construction and testing of their small satellites, and can follow hands-on demonstrations of satellite integration and testing.