Santi Tech Adventures

I am for now still continuing on the theme of space exploration, following on from my previous article, and the theme is still the incredible accessibility of space exploration as an activity. If a few days ago I was amazed by having met someone who actually had a satellite in space, the accessibility of space travel is even better illustrated by a Spanish company called PLD Space. These guys are making commercial, reusable rockets, and selling their services as a transport company that transports things to space. This, apparently, is set to become a $20Billion business within the next 10 years. The more high profile private space rocket projects are SpaceX, Elon Musk’s LA company, and BlueOrigin, founded by Amazon’s Dave Bezos. But, for me, what makes PLD Space extra special is the fact that it was started by 2 Spanish students, Raul Torres and Raul Verdu. These 2 engineers had no money, unlike Musk and Bezos, but even then, they could found a company with an aspiration as am...

A couple of days ago I happened to be talking to Dr, Elias Aboutanios , who was visiting us at Mestrelab . In amongst many other things, Elias was telling me about the Cubesats project. For me this was amazingly cool, as I am pretty sure it was the first time I have spoken directly to someone who has put a satellite into space. The thing that amazes me most about this is how doable it is nowadays. A few years ago, the cost of developing, making and launching a satellite would have been completely prohibitive to anyone except a few national agencies. Nowadays, however, this is very tractable, at least for Universities and other research organisations. We are getting to a point in which the economics of space research can even allow ingenious individuals to have their own space research projects. That, for me, is pretty amazing. Elias' satellite was 3D printed, it was sent up to the ISS in a container with a number of other things as part of a commercial space launch and it was ...

As a result of both my chosen profession and my interests, I am finding myself continuously open-eyed in wonderment at the amount of opportunities I come across, at the incredible ingenuity and creativity displayed by people in all walks of life, and by the wonderful life changing endeavours continuously sprouting everywhere in the global technology economy. I come from Galicia , the North-western corner of Spain. Galicia is what you could consider a backwater. The way of life is amazing, and it is full of hard working people, but it is nowhere near any information or new technology highway. When I was growing up, I had no aspirations of getting close to, never mind participating, in any paradigm changing technologies, at large or small scales. I probably aspired to working for a bank, or to be employed as a manager in some traditional business. However, in the last few years, since cofounding MestrelabResearch with my friend Carlos Cobas, I have been getting more and more i...