The 4.5-tonne satellite Galaxy XI, built for the US operator Panamsat, was placed into geostationary orbit by an Ariane 4, the European Space Agency's veteran workhorse, ESA officials here said.

The mission, from Europe's Spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana, was the last scheduled launch by the space powers before 2000, and came just ahead of the 20th anniversary, on December 24 1979, of the very first Ariane.

Europe starts the next millennium in space in fine shape.

It has an enviable record of mission reliability, a full order book for satellite launches, and a dazzling array of scientific projects either underway or in development.

Doug Millard, curator of space technology at Britain's Science Museum, said, "ESA has done some pretty impressive work in putting together a European launcher and its science projects have also been good.

"The launch service is now highly successful, and Europe's satellite industry has benefited correspondingly," he told AFP in a phone interview.

Before a consortium of countries put ESA together in 1975, space research in Europe was poorly funded, vulnerable to national competition and its personnel were mainly university academics.

Since then, space has become firmly established in the commercial arena. Hundreds of European companies have sprung up, researching, producing and launching satellites and rockets.

Only eight Ariane missions have failed. The latest success is the 51st in a row for the 11-year-old Ariane 4, which will gradually be superseded by the Ariane 5, a heavy lifter that carried out its first successful commercial launch last December 10.

Arianespace, which markets the Ariane launcher, has orders to launch 40 more satellites, worth around 3.07 billion dollars. It claims half of the world's market for launching commercial communications satellites in geostationary orbit.

In space science, too, Europe has made great strides. Its achievements include the probe Giotto, which encountered Halley's Comet in 1986; the solar observatory SOHO; and the newly-launched XMM telescope, which its inventors claim will be the most sensitive X-ray observatory ever built.

In the coming years, ESA is looking to send an exploration probe to Mars, another to the Moon and take part in the building of the International Space Station (ISS).

Yet even though ESA now rivals the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in unmanned missions, it is struggling to shake off an image as a second runner.

To those Europeans who are familiar with ESA, the agency seems to be something of a loose and rather bureaucratic consortium, whose products may be reliable but dowdy. Young Europeans seem far more interested in the better-promoted American achievements.

"ESA just doesn't have that kind of iconicity that NASA does, partly because the Americans have been in space much longer but also because they have manned flight," said Millard

As Europe becomes more and more confident about its role as a space power, it also will have to think about an organisational reform of ESA.

Fourteen member countries -- 15, when Portugal joins next year -- can make sometimes for slow and unwieldy decision-making.

Politics, too, can play a role, especially through the principle of a "fair return," whereby countries are allotted a slice of the development work in proportion to their investment in the project.