29 February

The births of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) on 29 February 1964 and the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), three weeks later, on 20 March 1964, marked the beginnings of the European endeavour in space.

The European Space Agency, formed on 30 May 1975 by the merger of ESRO and ELDO, is the legacy of the handful of European `space pioneers' whose far-sighted endeavours brought those two Organisations into being in the early sixties.