On this episode of the TechCentral podcast, we chat to South African space engineer Jonathan Lun about being named winner of Singularity University’s Global Impact Challenge Southern Africa for 2017.
As part of his prize, Lun will travel to the California, where he will interact with some of the world’s greatest minds to create moonshot innovations, with a focus on climate change.
Lun, who has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand — where his dissertation focused on “plasma thrusters” (vacuum arc technology) — won the prize for an audacious plan to use the metals in asteroids in order to bring them to Earth where they can then be mined for rare materials.
Listen as Lun explains how his solution works and why it’s needed. Also in the podcast, he talks about his involvement, through Denel’s Spaceteq — where he is a senior engineer — helping build government’s flagship EO-Sat1 Earth observation satellite. It’s a great listen!
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