This paper examines the ESA Academy Experiments programme, which has been overseen by the ESA Education Office. The programme empowers university student teams across Europe by supporting them throughout the entire project lifecycle. This includes concept development, testing, and executing experiments in cutting-edge gravity-altering facilities. It focuses on industry-standard engineering practices, project management, risk mitigation and funding techniques. Professional engineers and scientists provide regular guidance and interaction. The outcome of participation is a unique practical experience and training with the European Space Agency and its partners. Participation offers a unique hands-on experience with ESA and its partners, enhancing the students' academic journey. The paper outlines the phases of the programme before selection and the portfolio of platforms, including the Large Diameter Centrifuge, Bremen Drop Towers, Parabolic Flights, ICE-Cubes facility on the ISS, Space Rider and Orbital Robotics Lab. During the Campaign, the teams will finally be able to carry out their experiment on the selected platform and collect the long-awaited data. This is a unique and highly valued opportunity for the students who learn about managing large projects and meet the facility experts before starting the design of their experiments. Four months after the campaign, the teams will have to submit a final version of the documentation, which will conclude their project with ESA Academy.

Space Faculty aims to create opportunities for experimentation, learning and leadership through space. Owing to its strategic global network of partners across the private and public sectors, Space Faculty enables organisations and governments to unlock opportunities in the fast-growing space economy by building their talent, R&D, and industry development roadmaps. Space Faculty has helped to advance the space agenda in Asia in a myriad of ways including developing national-level STEM2.0 learning roadmaps for youths and professionals, enabling the private sector to tap into space-based and deep tech innovations or working with governments to create expand and leverage the space industry ecosystem.

In this presentation we will share some of the programmes we have developed specifically for emerging space-faring nations, to build the talent pipeline in their countries. The range of programmes covers levels from pre-schools to professionals, and each one touches on different areas such as satellite building, space data, life sciences or entrepreneurship, to name a few. We will focus particularly on our flagship programme, the International Space Challenge, and our upcoming international youth event Expand Space.

ESA parabolic flights provide an accessible, low-cost, reduced gravity environment for scientific research, technology development, and astronaut training. The human-accessible nature of the Airbus A310 Zero-G aircraft platform from Novespace allows experimenters to operate their experiments in-person, enabling real-time optimisation of scientific and technical return, and human biomedical experimentation with statistically significant N values. A high cadence of the reduced gravity periods (ninety-three times 22s per flight week) provides for redundancy and repeatability, whilst variation of the reduced gravity level, in addition to high quality weightlessness (average absolute deviation <0.007g), provides a gravitational analogue of any planetary body with 0
In addition to ESA parabolic flights’ long-standing service to the scientific community via the SciSpacE programme, two new application routes opened in January 2024: The first invites technology research proposals from academic institutions in ESA member states, offering platform access in a similar manner to the scientific community. The second invites proposals from commercial entities via an adaptation of the existing ESA process for evaluation commercial utilisation activities, offering access to ESA parabolic flights on a pro-rata basis according to the fraction of resources utilised. Together, these access routes represent the commitment of ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration (HRE) to support research enabled by our platforms, and that which will enable our further exploration of LEO, the Moon and Mars.

This presentation will provide an overview of ESA parabolic flight activities, an introduction to the capabilities of the Novespace A310 Zero-G, examples of previous and ongoing parabolic flight research, and details of how the scientific, educational and engineering communities can submit research proposals via ongoing and recently developed application routes to join ESA parabolic flights.