As ever, the huge disparities between the European
Space Agency's magazines' delivery dates and cover
dates continued on 2004/02/27 when I received the
November 2003 issue of "EDUnews". It contained the
potentially wonderful first call for proposals for
Ariadna, a new ESA initiative managed by ESA's
Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) (ah, aren't acronyms so
counterproductive?, kudos to the first person who
correctly recites exactly what ESA uses S/C; SC; SCOS; ADT
and ESTEC as abbreviations for without looking them up)
whose subjects are to include informatics and applied
mathematics, and also advanced engineering systems which
might require reliable software.

If you are eligible to apply for these contracts perhaps
you could use this opportunity to give ESA justification
to use Ada.

"Ariadna will be devoted to short, inexpensive studies
[..] Small ESA contracts will be awarded to teams of
research institutes and academic departments [..]".

HTTP://WWW.ESA.int/gsp/ACT/ariadna.html
Contact person: Torsten Bondo, ESTEC.
Telephone: +31 71 565 8426, fax: +31 71 565 6024.

Good luck,
Colin Paul Gloster.