The first European mission to Venus had its origins in a Russian mission to Mars.

In 1996, a huge payload lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, bound for the red planet, consisting of an orbiter, two ‘surface stations’ destined for a soft landing, and two penetrators which would impact the surface at high speed in order to burrow to a considerable depth and make measurements of the subsurface material. On board the orbiter was a number of scientific experiments built by European, mainly French, scientists who were collaborating with their Russian colleagues to explore the surface and atmosphere of Mars.

The launch on 14 November 1996 went well at first, but then everything was lost. The third stage of the booster was supposed to burn twice, once to achieve a temporary orbit around Earth and then again to align the trajectory towards Mars. The second burn failed and the scientific payload, over 6 tons of it, plummeted back to Earth.

The political situation in the eastern bloc was, by then, such that there was no prospect of rebuilding the mission and trying again. Instead, the Europeans looked into a project of their own which would use a smaller satellite to carry duplicates of the instruments they had built for the Russian mission. This could get to Mars in 2003; Mars Express was born.