Cubesats, balloons, and rockets: Top prof takes us to new space

Praying that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space?

Reg Lecture If you fancy leaving the turmoil of Earth for a bit, don’t worry. Leaving the planet may be about to get much much easier – so long as you don’t mind the company of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

That was one conclusion from last week’s splendid Reg Summer Lecture, courtesy of International Space University’s Professor Chris Welch.

As promised, Chris dived into the technologies that are revolutionising space exploration, from reusable rockets via tiny satellites to mega balloons, and how this has largely been achieved by Young Turks adopting the funding and development models of the software industry.

So, if you think NASA is the be all and end all of space exploration, or you simply want to get a grip on when you can book that off-planet weekend away, you really need to check the video of this lecture above.

In case you’re wondering, there are some tickets left for next week’s final Summer Lecture from Andy Stanford-Clark, covering the real life Internet of Things. Full details here.

We’re also looking ahead to our next series, so if you’ve got a fascinating story to tell to our readers, we’d love to hear from you. Just click the byline at the top of this story to send us an email. ®