The Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security (GMES) initiative lead by the European Commission and ESA recently opened the call to set up the 'Marine Care Service' for oceanography users. Two of the six planned 'Thematic Assembly Centres' will build on ESA's Medspiration and GlobColour projects, which covered, respectively, sea-surface temperature and ocean colour. Both are described in companion articles in this issue. The services will make full use of instruments aboard ESA's Envisat. Their successors on the Sentinel-3 satellite series will ensure operational space oceanography services for the two decades starting in 2012.