How to become an ESA supplier: esa-star registration and your first bid

Bidding to ESA is more formal than most public tenders, but the path is clear and the same for everyone. It starts with registration, not with an invitation to tender. Most of the work is best done before a suitable tender has even been published.

This guide walks through the practical steps from registration to contract. ESA's procurement rules, procedures, geographical return and evaluation are covered in more depth in our main guide to ESA tenders.

Registration starts from the Doing Business with ESA portal: choose esa-star Registration and then New Registration. The system first checks whether your organisation is already registered. If it is, user accounts come from your own organisation's Entity Administrator, not from ESA. You can also check registered organisations in the ESA Entities Directory.

There are two levels. In a Light registration you give the organisation's basic details. ESA validates them and issues an identifier, the Entity Code, which goes into the cover letter of every bid. In a Full registration you complete the whole questionnaire, and it must be approved before a contract can be placed. The information is updated every 12 months.

During registration you assign people to roles. The Entity Administrator manages users and is responsible for keeping the information up to date. The Bid Manager can open the bid work area and submit the bid. The role is a system permission, not a job title, and someone has to hold it even if your company has no bid manager.

State in the registration if your company meets the EU definition of an SME. SME status opens the tenders reserved for SMEs and can bring lighter payment conditions, such as an advance payment.

Logging in requires your credentials plus a one-time code sent by email. A registered user receives an email from esa-star for every new publication. There are several a day, and they are not filtered by what your company does.

Check eligibility first. The tender details show the countries whose organisations may bid (Open to Tenderers from), the procedure, any SME clause (C1–C4) and the closing date. If your country is not listed or the clause excludes your company, do not start the bid.

Second, compare the budget with your solution. ESA usually states a maximum budget, and a bid above it is not admitted for evaluation. If the work does not fit the budget, narrow the solution or skip the tender.

Third, assess your evidence. Part of the marks is given for the background and experience of the company and its staff in this particular field. A company from outside the space sector can do well by showing equivalent work from another industry and covering the missing competence with a partner.

Once you have decided to bid, express interest with the Express Interest button on the tender page. The expression is visible to other registered organisations, and you can also make it as a subcontractor only, which helps in finding partners. At the same time, ask your national delegation whether the programme requires a letter of support.

A bid needs two teams. One delivers the project and is presented in the bid. The other writes the bid. In a small company they are the same people, but the roles still have to be assigned: the person leading the bid (Bid Manager), a technical lead, the person preparing the costing and a signatory who accepts the contract conditions.

ESA distinguishes a subcontractor from an ordinary supplier. As a rule of thumb, a subcontractor has a work share above EUR 100,000, a significant involvement in intellectual property or responsibility for a work package. A subcontractor prepares its own ESA-style proposal for the prime, with costing forms, and its share counts towards its own country's geographical return. An ordinary supplier, such as a component vendor or a test laboratory, is handled through the company's own purchasing and appears in the costing as other direct costs.

The prime prepares a tailored invitation to tender for each subcontractor, containing only the requirements for that part of the work. The contract conditions flow down unchanged. An unclear work share shows up in the final bid as gaps and contradictions, and ESA marks the bid as a whole.

Agree the work share before the invitation to tender is issued. Partners can be found through the esa-match service, expressions of interest and industry days. An organisation from outside the ESA Member States is acceptable only exceptionally: it must be from a country party to the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), its share must be small and the need must be justified.

ESA prescribes the structure of a bid in detail, and the structure varies from tender to tender. The invitation to tender states which parts are required and how they are grouped into files. The typical parts are listed in the table at the end of this section.

In the lighter EXPRO procedure ESA provides a proposal template. Its structure, headings, margins and font must not be changed, and no sections may be removed. If a section does not apply to your bid, keep it and say why.

Costs are presented on ESA's PSS forms, which are available in the reference documentation on the esa-star Publication portal. Every organisation taking part in the bid completes and signs its own set. Work package descriptions have their own form template. The hours must match the content of the work packages, because that is exactly what the evaluation board checks.

Length earns no marks. As a guideline, a bid below EUR 200,000 runs to fewer than 50 pages and a larger one to fewer than 75. Calls for proposals often have a 25-page limit, and pages beyond it are not read.

Write simple, unambiguous English. Most evaluators read the bid in their second language, and they may only mark what the text says. Repeating the requirements is not enough: comment on them, name the hardest points and say how you will solve them.

ESA's evaluation board reads the whole bid, and several people read it. If two passages contradict each other, the evaluator cannot know which is correct and marks the point as unclear. Most lost marks can be avoided by checking the bid before submission.

Open the bid work area (Bidder Restricted Area) as soon as you have decided to bid. It is created from the tender page on the Publication portal, and each tender needs its own. The work area shows where each file is uploaded, and clarification and extension requests are submitted through it.

Files are uploaded as standard PDFs without password protection, and the maximum size is 250 MB per file. The cover letter and the CVs are uploaded as separate files in their own sections. On submission you make the mandatory declarations on compliance and on the Key Acceptance Factors.

Try the upload with a draft well in advance. Files can be uploaded and recalled freely, and nothing reaches ESA until you press Submit. After that the bid cannot be changed.

After the closing date the portal does not accept the bid. If the system is faulty, report it to the esa-star service desk before the deadline. You must not contact the Contracts Officer directly.

The best bidder is invited to negotiate. The meeting goes through the open points recorded by the evaluation board, such as the milestone payments. A negotiation can be a one-hour call or several full-day meetings, and its minutes can become part of the contract. Full esa-star registration must be complete before signature. In the EXPRO procedure it typically takes three to four months from the invitation to tender to the contract.

An unsuccessful bidder receives a regret letter. Ask for the oral debriefing within ten days. It tells you where the marks were lost and how your bid ranked, and it makes the next bid better.

The first bid is the hardest. After it, the registration, the forms, the company descriptions and the CVs are ready, and next time the effort goes into the solution itself. That is a reason to bid regularly and not to wait for the perfect tender.