Taking on New ESA Member States
ESA TV Exchanges
ESA currently counts 17 Member States, and between now an 2011, more European countries will join, bringing the total number above twenty.
Today's Exchange documents visits to hi-tech companies in Portugal and Luxemburg, who joined ESA some years ago, and investigates whether the Membership of their country in ESA has led to new business in the space sector.
The Exchange includes interviews with executives from these companies, and recordings of development and production activitires on their premises.
A WMV preview clip is online under http://esatv-movies.e-vision.nl/videos/mphi/new_members_29-11-06_wmphigh.wmv
A broadcast quality Mpeg-2 file (featuring A-roll only, 276 MB) is also online. Due to the file size, please use a download manager:
http://esatv-movies.e-vision.nl/videos/mpeg2/new_members_29-11-06_mpeg2ps.mpg

NEW ESA MEMBER STATES
10.00.00 ESA TV Leader
10.00.30 Title
10.00.40 Itís a quiet morning in Echternach, a small town in Northern Luxembourg where tranquillity exists side by side with high tech industrial activity. And itís inspection time at Euro-composites. The firm is specialised in lightweight structures for example for aeroplanes. But the secret behind their streamlined designs comes from nature itself:
10.01.03 CLIP Heike Poignand, Euro-Composites Sales Manager (18"") ëFor the aeronautical industry everything has to be very light and, of course, stable at the same time. So inside of this there is a kind of honeycomb which is a structure that we stole from the bees more or less, which we took from the nature itselfí.
10.01.22 Producing this rigid and at the same time light materials is a complex and rather secret process. Strips of Kevlar, an incredibly strong synthetic material, are processed to create honeycombed sheets that are later dipped in resin and heat treated i