A fifteen-member consortium of European countries for the design, development, and deployment of satellites. The Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) supports the European astronomical community in exploiting the research opportunities provided by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The ESA members are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, with Canada as a cooperating state.
The European Space Agency (ESA), established in 1975, is an inter-governmental organization dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 17 member states. Its headquarters are in Paris, France. ESA has a staff (excluding sub-contractors and national space agencies) of about 1,900 with an annual budget of about €3 billion in 2006.