How did ESA get started?
The European Space Agency was officially formed on May 30, 1975, when its 10 founding countries signed the ESA Convention. But its history also goes back further.
ESA was created by merging two European space organizations that were founded in the 1960s. The first, the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO), was a collective effort by six European countries to build a rocket capable of launching heavy satellites. The second, the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), was focused less on launches and more on space science. It was established in part through the work of the same scientific leaders who helped found the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN), the European physics collaboration that famously discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012.
When ELDO failed to get its rocket project off the ground, its funding dried up, and ESRO and ELDO were merged to create ESA. Since then, ESA has had a long record of success in launching its own satellites, observatories, and space missions, as well as collaborating with other space agencies like NASA, Roscosmos, and JAXA.