Duration – 50 mins

Space has been in the news a lot recently with SpaceX sending astronauts to the International Space Station and testing their Starship prototypes, ambitious plans at NASA to send people to the Moon by 2024, various probes on their way to Mars and even a probe on its way back to Earth after collecting samples from an asteroid.

With all of this activity it might appear that going into space is really not so difficult after all. The truth is though that space is hard. Lifting people and machines off of the surface of the Earth and propelling them successfully beyond the atmosphere is a massive challenge.

This absorbing talk uses archive footage and demonstrations to explore how people have met the extreme engineering challenges associated with launching people into space, keeping them alive and then safely returning them to Earth.