Hubert Curien

Hubert Curien was a French physicist and science administrator who served as President of the French national space agency, CNES, from 1976 to 1984, during which he championed and secured funding for the Ariane launch vehicle program, whose first successful flight came in December 1979 and which gave Europe independent access to space. He simultaneously served as the first chairman of the European Space Agency's governing council from 1981 to 1984, a period in which the young multinational agency consolidated the Ariane program and other cooperative projects among its member states, work that led to him being widely described as one of the principal architects of the modern European space program. Beyond his space career he was a specialist in crystallography and mineralogy, later serving twice as France's Minister of Research, where he championed European scientific cooperation more broadly, and the European Union's student and researcher mobility programs later carried his name in tribute to that work.