The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded Luxembourg-based ispace-EUROPE €65 million to develop and operate MAGPIE, a rover planned to search for water ice at the Moon's south pole in 2029.

Hello Everyone!
🛡️🛡️🛡️

I put out a call for moderators last month and had seven people apply. Thank you to everyone who took the time. The application asked for a lot – scenario judgement, a conflict question, and a research question about ESA's own branding policy – and the answers were thoughtful across the board. Narrowing it down was harder than I expected.

All three picks have accepted, and they're on the team as of today:

1. u/maiosi2 brings moderation experience from another community, along with a well-calibrated sense of when to step into a thread and when to leave it alone. Their answer on the difference between a post that breaks a rule and a post that breaks the spirit of the place was the clearest we received. They'll be helping the rest of us keep those two things apart.👏
2. u/Keelhauler95 thinks about moderation systemically. They understand that how you handle one post quietly sets the rule for the next fifty, and would rather write the grey area down than re-litigate it every time. They'll be taking the lead on tidying up and documenting the rules. They were also the only applicant who volunteered, unprompted, to tell the rest of the team in advance when their availability would dip.👏
3. u/Particularplaze came in with the most concrete proposals of anyone who applied, several of which we intend to act on. They'll be working on post flair and a FAQ setup, and they offered design help without being asked.👏

A note on u/Particularplaze and the karma requirement.

The application form listed a minimum of 19 combined karma. Particularplaze has 11. They told me so plainly when asked, gave the number without padding it, and accepted upfront that it might cost them the position. I have waived the requirement, and would rather be open about that than have it look like an oversight.

(The karma floor exists to filter out throwaway accounts and accounts created last week to grab a mod slot. Particularplaze's account is two years old, they read the sub daily, and they post rarely because they only post when they believe they have something worth adding. That is the behaviour the threshold was written to protect, not the behaviour it was written to catch. Enforcing the number literally in this case would have worked against its own purpose.)

The 19-karma minimum still applies to future rounds. Account age and application quality can override it, and when they do, we will say so publicly, as we are doing here.

What's next

Two ideas came up independently in several applications: The first is post flair or tags, so that news, career questions, mission updates and general discussion can be filtered apart. The second is a review of this subreddit's use of the ESA logo. We'll come back to the community on both.

To everyone who applied and isn't on this list: it was genuinely close, and a couple of the ideas I liked best came from applications I didn't select. Please don't read it as a verdict on your standing here, and please do apply again next time we open the team up.

Questions, objections and suggestions are welcome in the comments.

– The (no-longer-lonely) r/esa mod team 💚

Detection of Small debris is Maybe one of the Most important steps while Building megaconstellations.

Has anyone heard anything about ESA Reserve List vacancies?

Has anyone who applied already been contacted for the next steps - video interview, tests, panel interview, etc.? Do we know if applications are still mostly sitting at “under review”.

If you’ve applied recently, would be great to know roughly when the vacancy closed and whether you’ve had any updates.

Just trying to get a sense of the current timeline. Thanks!

Many thanks to the 7 very keen people who applied to join the mod team! I am now reviewing the quiz answers. Hope to get to a final selection this weekend!

Hi, I’m considering pursuing a career that could hopefully eventually put me in a position to apply for ESA astronaut selection.

I’ve completed studies for Earth science and I'm progressing to a relevant MSc and PhD, with Earth observation.

I have a question about the medical requirements:

Does current or previous use of antidepressants automatically disqualify an applicant, or is this assessed individually based on the underlying condition, stability and medical history?

I understand that ESA astronaut medical standards may be considerably more stringent than the basic Class 2 medical requirement which permits Sertaline as far as I'm aware.

I’m mainly interested in whether anyone knows of ESA guidance, aeromedical standards, or previous applicant experiences that clarify these points.

Thanks.

I am building a team for the ESA ISAM Innovation Sprint and need 3-4 people.

ESA opened an OSIP campaign on In-Space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing.

Winners get a fully funded Cooperative Agreement for 6 months.
The sprint itself is 5 days at ESTEC in Noordwijk, end of November.

Deadline to apply: 14 September. Yes, that's soon.

I have a concept for one of the use cases, a working financial model, and two people already on board.

What's missing:

Launcher / upper stage engineer.
Someone who knows residual propellant, passivation, stage design.

Propulsion or fluid transfer engineer.
Refueling mechanics, interfaces.

Someone from the demand side.
Satellite operator, space insurer, or space economist.

Space law.
Outer Space Treaty Art. VIII, Liability Convention. Advisor role is fine here.

Two ways to join:

Core team.
You co-author the submission, come to ESTEC in November, and get a share of the agreement if we win.

Advisor.
A few hours of review before 14 September, your name in the proposal, no travel.

Requirements: you're a national of an ESA Member State or resident in one, you're not already on another team in this campaign, and you can sign a short NDA.

Being upfront: no pay before the win, and travel to ESTEC is self-funded. If we win, that changes.

Interested? Reply here or DM me. I'll send a 5 minute screening form and we take it from there.

Maybe there is still a Chance of a Future Spaceport in UK.

I was expecting that Arianespace would deorbit the A62 upper stage, but Space-Track shows the upper stage in a similar orbit as MTG-I2.

I am currently a Computer science teacher in the UK and have worked for couple of years.

I already have a Bachelors and Masters in Computer science and Robotics. I was wondering does my teacher qualifies as work experience or would that not be valuable when it comes to applying for a job at ESA?

Just to add I have dual nationality if that helps (British and Latvian).

Does anyone understand why this wasn't a A64 launch with a 2nd satellite?

In the past week, I have been working on importing the publicly available ESA satellite 3D models into MuJoCo, a rigid-body physics simulator commonly used in robotics.

The models will be used as part of my PhD research to study satellite docking and evaluate how well vision-based fault detection NNs generalise across different satellite geometries and appearances. For this reason, I am trying to reproduce the ESA models as faithfully as possible, especially their geometry and textures.

I have run into three issues for which I would really appreciate some help:

1) Missing PLATO and Ulysses textures

The original download links are no longer working. Does anyone happen to have copies of these textures or know where they can still be obtained?

2) Comet Interceptor and Euclid texture mapping

I have the geometry and texture files for Comet Interceptor and Euclid, but I am having difficulty determining how the textures are supposed to be assigned to the different parts of the models. The OBJ files do not seem to make the material/texture assignments sufficiently clear. If anyone has worked with these models before or knows how the original texture mapping is intended to be reconstructed, I would greatly appreciate some guidance.

3) Permission to use ESA/designDATA 3D models

There are also some ESA satellite models created by designDATA in partnership with ESA that are available for viewing online but are not publicly downloadable. One example is the CryoSat satellite model on Sketchfab (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/cryosat-satellite-5bdb708b124a498f940bc7a2003225da)

Does anyone know who at ESA would be the appropriate person, team or department to contact to request permission to obtain and use these models for academic research?

Thanks for reading and I would be very grateful for any help regarding any of these issues.