One highlight was a lecture on the geology of the moon, and of course all the wonderful science that will be done using the Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer. Smug moment, as I designed a lot of that instrument!
Many of the other talks were about monitoring climate change. What we get shown in those sorts of lectures are often quite disturbing, such as changes to weather patterns, melting ice sheets, etc. I always come out of those lectures feeling quite angry about the kind of people who say things like "I don't believe in global warming, my mate down the pub reckons it's all a big scam to rip us off with taxes."
A free lunch always calms me down though.
Again this year we also had the head of Virgin Galactic telling us about their progress with their space tourism venture, and how the White Knight aircraft could also be used as an aerial launch platform for rockets carrying small satellites. I missed my second opportunity to ask him if, going on my experience with their trains, they plan to line the seats up with the windows in their spaceship.
Many of the other talks were about monitoring climate change. What we get shown in those sorts of lectures are often quite disturbing, such as changes to weather patterns, melting ice sheets, etc. I always come out of those lectures feeling quite angry about the kind of people who say things like "I don't believe in global warming, my mate down the pub reckons it's all a big scam to rip us off with taxes."
A free lunch always calms me down though.
Again this year we also had the head of Virgin Galactic telling us about their progress with their space tourism venture, and how the White Knight aircraft could also be used as an aerial launch platform for rockets carrying small satellites. I missed my second opportunity to ask him if, going on my experience with their trains, they plan to line the seats up with the windows in their spaceship.
No comments:
Post a Comment