Thursday, April 22, 2010

A visit to ESTEC



Did you know that Canada is part of the European Space Agency? Well, a sort of special guest, looking from afar. Anyway, I visited ESTEC, an ESA office located by the Dutch seashore city whose name remembers me of the volcano in Iceland (therefore, I cannot spell it). A whole day of presentations, quite interesting, topics of projects developed by the European private sector on Galileo, the GPS-like European system. The development of Galileo has been a tremendous boost to the aerospace industry in Europe, with lots of projects been contracted.




The quality of the presentations (not of the subjects) was a little disappointing. Our GGE undergraduates can do a much better job presenting technical stuff. Maybe they should start looking for jobs in Europe!

During lunch, guess what I discovered? The restaurant is run by Sodexo! They are here too. And guess what? The food is good and cheap. I later found that inside ESA offices there are no taxes, what helps to keep the price of food down.

Now, I have an idea. Maybe we should open an ESA office on UNB Campus. We would have good food and no taxes!

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