Institutes and facilities are spread over 13 sites, as well as offices in Brussels, Paris and Washington, D.C. DLR has a budget of €1 billion to cover its own research, development and operations.

[3] In the DLR School Labs, pupils can become acquainted with the practical aspects of natural and engineering sciences by conducting interesting experiments.

[citation needed] The modern DLR was created in 1997, but was the culmination of over half a dozen space, aerospace, and research institutes from across the 20th century.

In the 1920s Max Valier, a student of rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth, co-founded the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, VfR, or "Association of Space-Flight", with Johannes Winkler and Willy Ley.

The Great Depression put an end to the program and briefly after its break-up, Valier eventually was killed while experimenting as part of VfR activities in collaboration with Heylandt-Werke on liquid-fueled rockets in April 1930.

Valier and von Opel had engaged in a program that led directly to use of jet-assisted takeoff for heavily laden aircraft.

The private experiments of the late 1920s and early 1930s excited also the interest of the German military, which provided funding for further development of rockets as a replacement for artillery.

This led to an array of military applications, among them Germany's V-2 terror weapon, the world's first ballistic missile, and also the first human-made object to surpass the Kármán line and thus leaving the Earth's atmosphere.

In 1989, the DFVLR was renamed Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR; "German Research Institute for Aviation and Space Flight").

DLR's mission comprises the exploration of the Earth and the solar system, as well as research aimed at protecting the environment and developing environmentally compatible technologies, and at promoting mobility, communication and security.

DLR operates large-scale research centres, both for the benefit of its own projects and as a service for its clients and partners from the worlds of business and science.

In the field of energy research, DLR is working on highly efficient, low-CO2 power generation technologies based on gas turbines and fuel cells, on solar thermal power generation, and on the efficient use of heat, including cogeneration based on fossil and renewable energy sources.

In the future, 80 scientists and engineers will be doing research into topics such as space mission concepts, satellite development and propulsion technology.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera HRSC is the most important German contribution to the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission.

The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research made the payload engineering, eject mechanism, landing gear, anchoring harpoon, central computer, COSAC, APXS and other subsystems.

The framing cameras, provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the DLR, are the main imaging instruments of Dawn, a multi-destination space probe to the protoplanets 4 Vesta and 1 Ceres launched in 2007.

It is planned to enable researchers on Earth to conduct thousands of experiments in biology, materials science, fluid physics and many other fields under conditions of weightlessness in space.

The satellite's design is based on the technology and expertise developed in the X-SAR and SRTM SAR missions (Synthetic Aperture Radar).

DLR is a partner for RETALT (RETro Propulsion Assisted Landing Technologies), a program aiming to develop two-stage-to-orbit and single-stage to orbit reusable launch systems.

[14] DLR is involved in different European H2020 projects (AGILE, AGILE4.0) concerning aircraft design with the objective to improve multidisciplinary optimization using distributed analysis frameworks.

Scientists and engineers can use them for practical, application-oriented purposes: Earth observation, atmospheric research or testing new aircraft components.

A Boeing 747SP with a modified fuselage enabling it to carry a reflecting telescope developed in Germany is used as an airborne research platform.

On 31 January 2020, the DLR put its newest aircraft into service, a Falcon 2000LX ISTAR (In-flight Systems & Technology Airborne Research).

The German Aerospace Center's research work on CO2 emissions caused by air transport focuses for instance on model calculations concerning the effects of converting the global aircraft fleet to hydrogen propulsion.

This raises the question if CO2 emission-free hydrogen propulsion could perhaps limit the effects of growing air traffic volumes on the environment and the climate.

For the first time, scientists have achieved thermal water splitting using solar energy, generating hydrogen and oxygen without CO2 emissions.

[20] During the 2006 FIFA World Cup football championship, DLR implemented the Soccer project aimed at preventing traffic congestion.

As of 2022, the DLR had 35 sites in Germany:[22] Aachen and Aachen-Merzbrück Augsburg Berlin Bonn Braunschweig[27] Bremen Bremerhaven Cologne Cochstedt Cottbus and Zittau Dresden Geesthacht Göttingen Hannover Hamburg Jena Jülich Lampoldshausen Neustrelitz Oberpfaffenhofen Oldenburg Rheinbach St. Augustin Stade Stuttgart Trauen Ulm Weilheim (Oberbayern) Examples of DLR or parent institution human spaceflight missions:[43] Examples of research aircraft:[44] Examples of DLR (or parent institution) space missions.