Careers at the frontier of space technology

The European Space Agency (ESA) is globally recognized for its iconic space missions that push the boundaries of science and technology, whether it’s a rendezvous with a comet, landing a probe on Saturn’s giant moon Titan or mapping the stars of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. But ESA does so much more than these headline-grabbing scientific and exploratory endeavours.

“Space is no longer solely a playground for curious minds,” says Eric Wille, ESA Head of the Opto-Electronics Section. “It’s really important for our everyday life too.” In fact, modern society relies on space technologies.

Satellite-based environmental monitoring, weather forecasting and global navigation are obvious examples, but there are many other important applications. For instance, the global financial system could not function without atomic clocks aboard satellites time-stamping millions of stock trades and digital payments every second. Similarly, when natural disasters strike, satellite networks become essential lifelines: mapping floods, tracking wildfires and helping with the co-ordination of emergency response efforts on the ground.

Fulfilling all of these roles and ESA’s bold space ambitions – from seeking answers to big questions about the universe to watching over our precious planet – requires a highly dedicated, technically proficient and multi-skilled workforce made up of scientists, engineers and various other professionals.

Diverse and challenging work

When Wille joined ESA as an optical systems engineer in 2009 after completing his PhD in experimental quantum optics, it was the sheer diversity of challenging work that attracted him. “Working in an international space agency, you’re partly a researcher, partly a project manager, partly also someone with ambassadorial skills,” he says. “That mixture is really something which I found at that time very attractive and I still like today, very much.”

Charlotte Pachot also craved a technically challenging role after her master in optics. She found it at Thales Alenia Space in France as a space engineer working on optical instruments. But after a few years, her interactions with ESA staff through joint projects convinced her to join the Agency as an optical engineer. She is now Lead Payload Engineer for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, intended for launch in 2035, which will be the first gravitational wave detector in space.

Both Wille and Pachot have found that the technically challenging work at ESA is particularly satisfying because it has real-world impact. The first 10 years of Wille’s ESA career were largely spent on Athena (Advanced Telescope for High ENergy Astrophysics; now renamed NewAthena), a powerful X-ray observatory set to launch in the late 2030s that will provide fresh eyes on a wide range of hot and energetic processes in the universe.

In this role, Wille and the ESA team collaborated with an industrial consortium led by Dutch measuring instrument supplier cosine to develop a completely new type of optics, called silicon pore optics. Using techniques perfected by the semiconductor industry, cosine bonded and stacked many silicon plates on top of each other. By shaping the plates, a lightweight mirror to focus X-rays was created; in fact, 10 times lighter than the ones flying on current X-ray missions XMM-Newton and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Like Athena, LISA will also provide fresh eyes on cosmic events, but through the unique prism of gravitational waves. This will be achieved through a completely new approach involving a triangle of three satellites spaced 2.5 million kilometres apart.

Understandably, LISA calls for a unique optical bench, which Pachot is managing from design to manufacturing and testing. She sees her role as being like that of a conductor of an orchestra: a lot of her time is spent co-ordinating team members and partners, while also helping to solve technical, budget and schedule problems. For Pachot, tackling these daily friction points is part and parcel of working on real-world big science. “The instruments are very complex technically, very challenging, but they are also real pieces of hardware as part of a real project,” she says.

International community

As Wille and Pachot’s stories show, ESA selects talent from different career stages.  The Agency offers several programmes that support students, graduates and experienced professionals in finding the right role for their profile and interests.

For example, university students can benefit from ESA Academy sponsorship, such as participating in hands-on projects or training sessions. They can also join ESA as interns. Graduates can apply to ESA’s Graduate Trainee Programmes where they can gain experience on actual ESA projects and develop technical and professional skills. And for those currently in industry with less than three years’ experience, the Junior Professional Programme allows them to join ESA as staff members for four years and benefit from tailored learning and development opportunities to prepare them for a long-term position.

Whichever pathway they take, once new recruits get started in their first role, an excellent employment package – including competitive salary and pension scheme, hybrid working and flexible hours, and professional development training opportunities – comes as standard.

What sets ESA apart is the multicultural work environment. Team members might come from any of ESA’s 23 Member States and nine further Cooperating States and Associate Members.  And recruits can be based in more than nine locations in seven countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Spain and the UK). This makes for a melting pot of cultures.

“There’s a very lively expat community,” says Wille. “At the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) and other big sites, it’s like a small Europe.”  This cultural diversity is of course intentional. “The problems we have to solve require teamwork,” says Pachot. “And this is made easier at ESA because we all see problems in a different way depending on our culture.”