ESA’s Operations Directorate is primarily based at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), with activities also taking place across the ESA sites. As Europe's centre of excellence for satellite operation, ESOC is home to the engineering teams that control spacecraft in orbit, manage our global tracking station network, and design and build the systems on the ground that support missions in space. It is also the home of ESA’s growing Space Safety programme: protecting lives and infrastructure in space and on Earth from hazards originating in space, such as asteroids, space debris and space weather. Since 1967, more than 80 satellites belonging to ESA and its partners have been successfully flown from the Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. Today, about two dozen satellites are flown from ESOC, with three more flown from ESA’s European Space Security and Education Centre at Redu, Belgium. These include ESA’s planetary, astronomy and exploration missions, ‘Earth Explorer’ Earth observation missions and technology demonstration missions. They also include the Sentinels, a fleet of spacecraft flown by ESA as part of Europe’s Copernicus programme – the world’s most ambitions Earth observation programme.
