›Thinking Tomorrow

ESA's Advanced Concepts Team has been created 10 years ago. For this occasion, a two days event will take place on 2-3 July at ESTEC (Netherlands) to review current space research, analyse trends and consider new areas for the future, outside the traditional planning horizons of ESA.

The ACT has been created 10 years ago as an internal research group tasked to perform, monitor and foster research with a time horizon roughly 10+ years ahead. With no crystal ball at hand, some of the concepts revealed to be just not good enough while others were smiled at initially before being adopted and welcomed by others and ... best measure of success: made theirs.

According to our motto hic futura parantur, and following Saint-Exupéry, "As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." we are not only thinking about the future but actually perfroming what we hope are first small steps with contrete research projects.

This tenth anniversary of the team, which substantially changed over time, is a perfect occasion to invite all of those interested in the mid to long-term future, the researchers, the visionaries, the "thinkers", to join us for a two days event, 2 and 3 July 2012 here at ESTEC.

During the two days you will have the occasion to discuss your own research, ideas and contribute to others, to get a glimpse into the next space 'ideas' and to propose your personal take:

Monday 2 July 2012: un-conference (ESTEC, lunch corners)
Tuesday 3 July 2012: conference (Newton 2, ESTEC)

Come and prepare the future of space with us ...

The Advanced Concepts Team