Originally Posted by
dead_pan
She doesn't work at ESTEC then? To be fair, some of the Brits working there were the worst offenders.
Both are correct. I have been working with ESA (and ESTEC in particular) since early 90's on joint international projects and visited ESTEC every 2-3 months sometimes. ESTEC is indeed a nice place where many nationalities work in a friendly atmosphere. To a large extent this is because The Netherlands, as a host country, is very comfortable for foreigners.
I recall only one funny episode: going through a long corridor I noticed a hand-written plate on one office saying "only fans of Celtic work here" (I assume it was about football). I asked my ESTEC friend whether it was a joke, and he answered: "50/50, really tough guys inside and you'd better not discuss sport issues with them" :-)
As for UK astronauts, ESA works according to a so-called "geographic return" principle. It implies that funding of the industrial contractors from a particular country should be balanced with the budget that this country allocates to ESA. The same for the number of staff. In 90's there were times when the UK decreased its funding and the number of British engineers and scientists also decreased. Accordingly, when ESA started sending astronauts to space, there were surprisingly nearly no one from the UK (France and Germany prevailed). Only in the last 10-15 years the situation improved.