The House

Imagine you live, work, and play in a huge, old, beautiful, complex mansion with many other people.

Imagine that your beloved home, impressive as it is, is besieged by problems; half of the toilets haven’t worked in years, the air is becoming increasingly fetid, the folks in one wing won’t let anyone else use their facilities, and whilst the taps don’t work in one part of the house, there’s water pouring in from somewhere in another.

And it just keeps getting hotter.

For years you and your fellow residents have been following the ‘make do and mend’ philosophy, using only that which can be found in your house (after all, it’s big enough); knocking down one wall to fix another, using old carpet to patch up the windows, breaking up abandoned furniture for fuel, and so on. Now, however, all that is getting harder to do, and it is starting to cause some very real problems, both for the structure of the house, and the sanity of its residents.

Until one day, someone has a profound idea!

“Let’s find a way to look at the place from OUTSIDE! We might be able to figure out some of these problems!”

After much effort, and against much protest from those who think that everything needed to fix the house is already in the house, a small group find their way outside and survey your home from a different perspective.

And they find huge cracks in the walls, and a hole in the roof, and subsidence, and blocked drains, and that heat insulating filth from within has coated the building, and a thousand other things, and the closer they look, the more they understand what can be done to alleviate some of the problems within.

Despite these crucial insights however, some of the residents still claim that going outdoors is a luxury, questioning why resources are spent on surveying the house and its surroundings, rather than on turning sinks into toilets, or on finding new sources of carpet to patch up windows. As they make these claims, they use more resources on moisturiser and aftershave than have ever been used on surveying the house. 

Meanwhile, those who mine the foundations of the building for materials, or who produce most of heat insulating filth that blankets the house, flatly dismiss the findings from outside, claiming bias, stupidity, and conspiracy.

Nevertheless, using information gained from outside, improvements to structures, facilities, and behaviours are made, with each new insight producing brand new solutions.

Soon however, it is realised that the damage we have done to the house over the generations is too severe; that there is only so much we can do to fix the house using the resources of the house itself. So slowly and surely, eyes turn to the vast resources and opportunities that are ‘outside’; to the potential of generating clean energy out there to power what goes on in here, to no longer mining the structural materials of the house in favour of using the stone and metal found outside, which is enough to fix up millions of houses like yours. And for all that to be done in the safe, sustainable ways that have been discovered by studying your home from beyond its own boundaries.

And so, with much resistance, to bellowed accusations of frivolity, and indifference, and conspiracy, your house ceases to be a single, isolated building, and becomes part of a landscape, of an ecosystem, of an economy.

Imagine, your children will enjoy that beautiful house in ways that you never could, now that it’s been rescued and returned to its former glory. Some may not even live in the house, they may live ‘outside’, in other houses, of all shapes and sizes, all responsibly built and maintained by the research and revelations that came from renovating that original house.

And in all their travels, and through all their adventures, no matter where they live, or what they become, to your children, your house will always be Home. 

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Since the dawn of the Space Race, Humanity has used its armada of orbiting sensors, beacons, and relays to examine and understand our planet and its neighbours.

In the 1970’s researchers seeking to better understand why Venus, long believed to be a sister world to our own, was in fact a hellish place with an atmosphere violent enough to first crush and then melt Lead, made a series of startling discoveries. They found that fluorine compounds in its atmosphere had a destructive effect on ozone molecules, whilst high amounts of carbon dioxide thermally insulted the planet. It was these observations of our nearest neighbour that kick started our understanding of the effects CFCs were having on our own ozone layer, and that carbon dioxide emissions were having on the temperature of our world.

Since then, our space-based observations have been at the heart of our efforts to monitor, model, and mitigate Humanity’s impact on our home planet, and on each other.

ESA Space Solutions, and its Business Applications programme, is dedicated to supporting innovative, sustainable new services that use these space applications (such as global positioning, satellite communications, and Earth Observation) to address challenges right here on Earth.

For examples of previous funded activities, check out our fully searchable archives: https://business.esa.int/projects

In addition to supporting business ventures with a focus on Earth, we are increasingly working with a variety of partners to explore how we can support those seeking commercial opportunities off world, for example, by using the facilities on board the International Space Station to develop more efficient fibre-optics, or pharmaceutical products.

In the coming years, as international partnerships between the public and private sector expand Humanity to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, and with UK business already winning contracts in this arena, there will be many more commercial opportunities to use the resources of space for the benefit of our species, our planet(s), and our future.

To support businesses wishing to explore funding opportunities from ESA Business Applications, the Regional Ambassador Network operates locally across the UK as an initial point of contact, offering unbiased, friendly advice to organisations of any size, in any sector.

So, whether you already have a business idea using space assets, or you wish to better understand these assets and their potential for your business, please don’t hesitate to contact your friendly, neighbourhood ESA Business Applications Ambassador.

We're all in this together, and we need more space.