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Over the last 11 years the language for mission planning (LMP) has grown from a small starting block through to an operational planning mechanism used by many ESA missions. Throughout this time it has evolved and matured from its initial ESA study to an operational and configurable functionality of many ESA missions controlled from ESOC. The LMP has been an integral part of operational planning systems in ESOC for the past seven years now, being developed further during ESA run studies and driven from operational needs and experiences. This evolution is still in full swing today with more recent and future missions taking it on board. These include such missions as Gaia, Rosetta and BepiColombo. All of these missions are providing new ideas and direction for the language as well as introducing additional concepts to those already existing, and more importantly gaining valuable experience with the capabilities of the language. In this paper we first provide an overview of the LMP with all of its intricacies, illustrating an evolution timeline from its birth to present day and outlining the Missions/Applications where it has already successfully been employed. We will provide details of the functionalities that were additionally required to extend the capabilities of the LMP for the operational concepts and show how these concepts have been re-used across missions for tasks with similar characteristics. We will elaborate, although briefly, on the concepts it has been designed to implement and how these have changed over the years, whilst giving a couple of concrete examples of the LMP in action taken from operational missions. Following on from this, the major evolutions of the language over its lifetime so far will be discussed with reference made to their origin and particular need. We then move on to discuss the relation of the LMP to the Mission Planning System Framework (MPSF) and how these two have been integrated together to form the Rosette/BepiColombo planning system. Finally we conclude the paper with a discussion on the foreseeable future of the LMP, identifying possible extensions and elaborating on the possibilities for future missions.

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enus Express is Europe's first mission to the planet regarded as the Earth's sister, to investigate the secrets of the Venusian atmosphere, which may help us to better understand the environmental processes of our home planet. Part of the ESA "Flexibility" Program, development costs have been kept down by maximum reuse of components from predecessor missions (this being a stated aim) -in this case, the direct predecessor being Mars Express. This includes both the spacecraft, and the ground systems. As part of the Mission Operations Centre, the Venus Express Mission Planning System has been successfully developed under tight budgetary and schedule constraints.Consistent with the stated objective, the existing Mars Express Mission Planning System (MPS) was used as the starting point for the Venus Express MPS, allowing a stable system to be rapidly provided under tight budgetary and schedule constraints. In turn, the core of the Mars Express MPS originated from a slimmed-down version of the Envisat Flight Operations Segment MPS -with generic elements being identified as potential candidates for reuse.In this paper, we chart the development of the software during the Venus Express MPS implementation, and how the underlying planning kernel has been enhanced further by this process. This kernel, now referred to as EKLOPS (Enhanced Kernel Library for Operational Planning Systems), also forms the basis of several other planning developments being undertaken on behalf of the European Space Agency.