The ESA’s spaceport is located in French Guiana in South America.
The European Space Agency (ESA) was founded on this day in 1975 as an umbrella organization for all similar institutions in Europe. Today it has 22 member states, but not all members are also members of the European Union (notably Switzerland and Norway), and all EU member states don’t participate in the ESA (Croatia, Slovenia, Latvia, Slovakia, Bulgaria).
The headquarters of the ESA are in Paris, but its bodies are spread throughout Europe and some are actually outside its boundaries. For example, the ESA’s spaceport is located in French Guiana in South America. That country is part of France’s state territory and is legally part of the EU.
The main research center of the ESA is near Noordwijk in the Netherlands, a few kilometers from the university city of Leiden. The European Space Operations Center is located in the German city of Darmstadt, while astronauts are trained in the European Astronaut Center (EAC) near Cologne, Germany.