ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team

A decade of future visions from ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team

“Ion beams to clean up space debris, exotic metamaterials, fluid-like spacecraft made up of many tiny fractionated parts and planetary landers borrowing tips from bumblebees – ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team looked forward on its tenth anniversary, discussing creative ideas for space’s future. Based at ESTEC, ESA’s technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the team celebrated its first decade on 2-3 July, gathering former members and research partners from all across Europe, with guests from the US and Japan…. Alastair Reynolds explained the relationship between science and science fiction was really two-way in nature: today’s mainstream scientific concepts such as terraforming and wormholes originated in yesterday’s science fiction – and the movie 2001 back in 1968 depicted a prototype iPad, highlighted in a copyright court case last year.