ESA – General Support Technology Programme (GSTP)

The GSTP (General Support Technology Programme) enables missions by making sure the right technology, at the right maturity level is available at the right time.

What is GSTP?

Through the optional General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) ESA, Participating States and Industry work together to convert promising engineering concepts into a broad spectrum of useable products.

The Programme takes leading-edge technologies that are not ready to be sent into space and then develops them to be used in future missions, missions that will help us to discover the Universe, understand our environment, navigate, educate and save lives.

The GSTP has demonstrated itself as a successful and key programme for building know-how and capabilities in the industry, having been recognised by the Participating States as one of the best instruments in ESA to help assure Europe’s competitiveness in the global market, creating jobs and keeping Europe at the forefront of technological innovation.

What does GSTP do?

In Space, spare parts and repairs are hard to come by, so any technologies sent into its unforgiving environment must have proven itself on Earth through a series of increasingly more intense tests.

GSTP’s activities bridge this gap between already proven technologies and space missions through the development of engineering models or ‘breadboards’ whose space-worthiness can be verified in ESTEC’s laboratories and test centre. There the budding technologies are subjected to acceleration, temperature or radiation extremes.

GSTP takes technologies through these increasingly more intense tests, all the way up to sending the technology to space on demonstration mission flights in orbit.

These Technologies cover every technology readiness level from TRL 3 up, and range from individual components to subsystems right up to complete satellites on the brink of spaceflight or beyond.

The development of Technology – making new things to do new things – is central to ESA’s existence. The Agency spends around 8% of its budget on direct research and development, an activity mandated in the ESA Convention. It runs many preparatory programmes to do this, covering various different inventions, each leading activities based on their technical maturity or their field.

• TDE The Technology Development Element is responsible for early development stages across all service and technology domains, taking cutting-edge ideas and testing their suitability for space applications.
• GSTP The General Support Technology Programme is an optional programme that takes previously proven innovations through to succeeding stages of engineering, finally evolving fully-tested hardware ready for adoption by future missions.

Doing Business with ESA 

The Portal Doing Business with ESA provides a single point of access to the various ESA IT Corporate Applications for all economic operators who have or intend to have a business relationship with ESA.

The portal can be accessed at https://doing-business.sso.esa.int

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