 | ||
This is a list of government agencies engaged in activities related to outer space and space exploration.
Contents
As of 2015, 70 different government space agencies are in existence; 13 of those have launch capability. Six government space agencies - the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the European Space Agency (ESA), the China National Space Administration (CNSA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (RFSA or Roscosmos) have full launch capabilities; these include the ability to launch and recover multiple satellites, deploy cryogenic rocket engines and operate extraterrestrial probes. Only three currently operating government space agencies in the world - RFSA and the CNSA and NASA are capable of human spaceflight as of 2016.
The name given is the English version, with the native language version below. The acronym given is the most common acronym: this can either be the acronym of the English version (e.g. JAXA), or the acronym in the native language. Where there are multiple acronyms in common use, the English one is given first.
The date of the founding of the space agency is the date of first operations where applicable. If the space agency is no longer running, then the date when it was terminated (i.e. the last day of operations) is given. A link to the Agency's primary website is also given.
List of space agencies
Budgets
The annual budgets listed are the official budgets for national space agencies available in public domain. The budgets are not normalized to the expenses of space research in different countries, i.e. higher budget does not necessarily mean more activity or better performance in space exploration. Note also that budget could be used for different projects: e.g. GPS is maintained from the US defence budget, whereas ESA's money is used for developing the European Galileo positioning system. The data for authoritarian countries are unreliable. For European contributors to ESA, the national budgets shown include also their contributions to ESA.