Digital historical archive of ESA online

For the first time, the digital content of the ESA Archive’s historical collections is made freely available in a single place. This website is the result of years of digitisation and brings together the current digital holdings of the ESA Archives on one platform. This includes both material held at the European Centre for Space Records (in particular the ESA image collections documenting the very earliest years of ESA) and archival holdings deposited with partners in the Historical Archives of the European Union. As part of ESA’s Digital Agenda for Space, digitisation will continue and new collections will be added regularly.

I am particularly pleased that I was able to make a small contribution to this archive as part of the Oral History of Europe in Space project, in which I was able to conduct numerous interviews with Austrian space pioneers. In this context, the book “Weltaum-Land Österreich” was also written, which gives an overview of the pioneering times of Austrian space research since the 1960s.