This collection consists of 35 references, the majority of which were published in both in English and French, on the telecommunication studies undertaken by ESA’s predecessor ESRO between 1967 and 1972. They were the outcome of an initial request from the European Conference on Satellite Communications (CETS) in November 1966 for ESRO to conduct a definition study of a programme for the development of European communication satellites and subsequent studies commissioned by the European Space Conference (ESC) in 1967 and produced by a joint working group in 1970.
The material includes ESRO’s first technical studies in the latter half of 1967; progress reports, the industrial consultation of autumn 1969, the early 1970 recommendations of the working group on telecommunications; issuing of tenders in autumn 1970; the proposals submitted by industry contractors throughout 1970 and 1971; and the programme for the execution of Phase Two of the ECS project from February 1972.
We believe that this documentation was transferred in 1972 to the ESTEC Documentation Office in the Netherlands by Pierre Blassel, Deputy Director of ESTEC and Head of the Satellite and Sounding Rocket department, who led the studies into television distribution satellites for CETS.
From there it was subsumed into a miscellaneous collection, called ESA-X, created by the ESTEC Librarian when there was no centralised archive at ESA. This was simply a container for a large amount of seemingly unrelated material, ranging from publications and internal technical documentation to HR policy papers and annual reports, and did not follow any logical order or thematic raison d’être. It came to consist of about 4 000 files gathered under the strange reference ‘X’ that never meant confidential or restricted, which were subsequently transferred to the ESA Archives in around 2002.
As a result of its mixed nature, the ECSR has taken the decision to split ESA-X into smaller collections according to concrete topics, such as telecommunications, for the purposes of digitisation. This virtual recreation will offer selected highlights for each topic, but will also retain a record of its provenance from the ESA-X Collection of the ESTEC Library.
A selection of 27 references from this technical documentation on telecommunications, in both English and French, has recently been digitised. This digital collection has also been conceived as an example of how the technical work produced by ESRO formed the foundation for future ESA activities, acting as a ‘bridge’ between the two organisations.
To browse the collection, enter the SHIP database and search for ‘CETS’.
Once you have selected a copy, SHIP’s image viewer allows you to select your preferred viewing mode by clicking the 'image viewer' icon on the right of the top header bar.