| | |  | Michel Courtois | |
Spot's father is now head of ESA’s research and technology centre
13 September 2004
On 1 May last, Michel Courtois was appointed Director of Technical and Quality Management and head of ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The former member of CNES and of industry is currently preparing the Centre for its new missions in the service of Europe’s citizens.
To take over the reins at ESTEC, ESA Council selected a man with first hand experience of the field, who is also well-known in institutional and industrial space circles. Through his 30-year career at the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Michel Courtois has secured a well-established reputation for effectiveness and put an imprint on most of the standard-bearing programmes of the French Space Agency, from Spot to Ariane.
When a young graduate at the French “Ecole Polytechnique”, there was nothing to suggest that Michel Courtois would make a career in the space sector. Then in April 1969, a few months before a man first walked on the Moon, a meeting with General Robert Aubinière, the then Director General of CNES, prompted him to choose the space sector and join the CNES Toulouse centre.
| | | Flight 151 - Spot satellite being put into the fairing |
From Argos to Spot
When he started working at CNES, the agency was going through in-depth changes, midstream between the end of the Diamant programme and the beginning of the research and application programmes. “I started off on preliminary satellite studies and in particular the Argos programme, for the collection of data generated by transmitters scattered all over the globe”.
Michel Courtois participated in the preliminary studies for an Earth observation satellite. “We were a team of four or five people who had to design the system and define the type of sensors to be used” he remembers. The result was the Spot programme, implemented by France, Belgium and Sweden, whose platform was subsequently reused by the ESA’s European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites and the Helios reconnaissance satellites, which in turn served as a development platform for Envisat and Metop.
Appointed Project Leader in 1984, Michel Courtois was responsible for Spot 1 up to its being put into orbit in February 1986 and during its first year of operation. “We had to develop operations for the Spot system; everything had to be invented, but the satellite behaved just as it had during the simulations - it was fascinating”.
| | SMOS | |
Small and large satellites in Toulouse
Michel Courtois took over responsibility for CNES’s application satellites before becoming Project Director of the space plane Hermes project within an integrated ESA/CNES team. When the project was brought to a halt, he took over the leadership of the Toulouse Space Centre in 1993.
It was under his directorship that the activities of mini and micro satellites commenced with the Proteus line (soon to be used for ESA’s SMOS satellite) and Myriad, the first model of which was launched by the Demeter mission. After the failure of the first Ariane-5 mission in June 1996, he took over responsibility for the Ariane-5 programme. Appointed Deputy Director General of CNES in 1996, he was in charge of all technical activities and projects.
In 1999 Michel Courtois left CNES for industry when he became Technical Director of Alcatel Space in Toulouse. “I was involved in research and development, and product policy. In a nutshell, I was involved with anything relating to technology, quality and methods”.
| | | Aerial view of ESTEC |
Optimisation as a target
Friendly and congenial, and known for his modesty and frank talking, Michel Courtois has now taken over as Director of ESTEC for a four- year term and makes no mystery of his European commitment: “There cannot be any ambitious space programme in Europe today unless it is European. This requires political determination and a better management of all European resources allocated to space”.
For Michel Courtois, one of the keys to success is an improvement in the current organisation. “We need to optimise procedures and set up a really efficient management just as industry has managed to do, so as to enhance effectiveness and competitiveness. This requires a measure of drastic reappraisal, careful choice of priorities and working together. The objective is to get projects through while keeping control over costs and delays”.
“Similarly, we need more rigour and clearer vision in the initial phases of projects and above all, the ability to make decisions even if it may be difficult in a European context.”
“ESTEC has a most impressive reservoir of know-how and talent, but much has to be done to make the best use of it so as to respond to the demands of the Agency’s new missions”.
Pushing this evolution through is currently a major challenge at a time when the space sector as a whole is experiencing one of the most difficult periods in its history, calling for unprecedented reappraisals.
“We need an in-depth change in approach. This is difficult but it has been successfully done in other fields and there is no reason why it cannot be done. Jean-Jacques Dordain has indicated the path to follow, whatever the obstacles may be”..
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