 Meanwhile, Britain decided to focus its efforts on the indigenous Black Arrow launcher instead.During 1974, the European Space Agency (ESA) was founded for this purpose; the ESA effectively enabled the competing and overlapping national space programmes to be succeeded by a single organised multinational framework with work shared between the member states instead.Specifically, in 1976, work commenced on the new collaborative Ariane 1 launcher, the first version of what would become the highly successful Ariane family.