European Space Agency
On May 30th, the European Space Agency celebrated its 45th anniversary, having been established in 1975. With its rapid development of the Ariane rocket and using the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, French Guiana as a spaceport, the ESA rapidly overtook both the Americans and the Soviets in space exploration. While NASA and Roscosmos (the Russian Space Agency) do their much-publicised launches and Space Station missions, the ESA has quietly and steadily gone about its own agenda.
It launched its first low-earth orbit satellites that same year. By the mid-1980s it had jumped ahead of all other major nations in its development of the International Space Station (ISS). By the mid-1990s it had its first permanently-occupied Moon research station - Lebeau Station - and by 2000 it successfully launched a crew on its Deep Space Airbus to Mars and returned them safely to Earth. In 2009 it christened its Voltaire Mars Base and in 2017 it successfully landed a data-collecting rover on Thebe, an asteroid-looking minor moon of Jupiter.
It is currently expanding its Lebeau Moon Station to accommodate as many as 60 permanent, full-time scientists and their families, expanding the ISS, and preparing its fourth Mars mission, scheduled for 2023. They are anticipating a permanently-occupied Mars facility by the early 2040s, expanding on equipment and materiel already put in place on the planet’s surface. The ESA is petitioning the United Nations to allow it to declare the portion of the moon where the Lebeau Station operates as French territory, a principle that could cultivate fantastic and belligerent escapades in space by the great powers. Failing that, the ESA would like to see the Moon partitioned in a way similar to the current zones of influence in Antarctica. Sanctioning the principle of space colonies, however, seems extremely dodgy.
Or not.