Imperial’s multidisciplinary Space Lab

The private and government-backed UK space sector is set to quadruple in size by 2030 and Imperial Space Lab is aiming to get in on the action. Some people would have you believe that the pioneering spirit that put a man on the moon in 1969 has been lost in the past half century. Although piloted-missions have proved prohibitively costly and dangerous, you could conversely argue that we're in a golden age of discovery - for example uncovering amazing and possibly life-harbouring worlds such as Saturn's moon Enceladus and most recently chasing down, then landing on, comet 67P (all while zipping along at a cool 135,000 kilometres per hour). Both these respective missions, Cassini and Rosetta, have had key experiments and technology build and designed here at Imperial. Indeed, the College has one of the largest and longest running space 'harbours' in the UK - dating back to Imperial's involvement in the Ariel satellite missions of the late 1960s. Traditionally though, the College's space research groups have tended to operate quite independently - dispersed across a number of departments. But with the £9 billion UK space sector projected to grown to £40bn by 2030, spearheaded by the UK Space Agency, there's a need for more collaboration both internally and externally.