BIS Council visits Italy

We would like to give our heartfelt thanks to Alistair, Mark, Colin and Steve for visiting with the local section of the British Interplanetary Society and working for 48 very dense hours to establish important connections with three main institutions in the space sector. Time has been found, too, to meet with local members and mix with them sharing interests and stories. It has been an incredible experience, and here is a very short report.

Visit_INAFWe started on Monday, meeting at IAPS/INAF with Livia Giacomini, responsible for IAPS Communications, Outreach and Education, while unfortunately director Pietro Ubertini couldn’t free himself from his many commitments. We presented the BIS history and its aims, and the activities of our group. Our thanks extend to IAPS/INAF too, as they very kindly provided us with a meeting room large enough to invite our members for this face to face gathering with BIS Council representatives, a very rare occurrence here in Italy. Livia, who is well acquainted with us, is already going to put in work some forms of cooperation between her Institution and a our Society.

Visit_ASIOn Monday afternoon we met with Cesare Sodi, head of ASI Communications and Public Relations, and Paola Gentilini, the latter being very well acquainted with our activities. After the presentations we discussed possible ways of cooperations and we found a great interest and the willingness to do more things together. The Agency is now pushing for the ExoMars programme as a key outreach effort and they already asked for our support for the European Research Night next September. We are very grateful to ASI for finding time, on a very short notice, to meet us and we look forward to interesting cooperations.

Visit_ESAOn Tuesday we spent most of the day at ESRIN where Simonetta Cheli (Head of Coordination Office for the Directorate of EO Programmes) and her staff (special thanks to Mrs Walker) had organized for us a meeting with many officials, and a visit to different ESRIN facilities (more on these in a later post). At the meeting we presented again the Society, its activities and our proposals to Simonetta Cheli, to Monica Talevi (Head of STEM Education and Outreach Unit, Director General’s Cabinet), to Francesco Sarti (Scientific Coordinator, EO Education and Training Activities, Directorate of EO Programmes), and Robert Meisner (Communication Programme Officer, Directorate of EO Programmes). We found a real concurrence of objectives and scopes between our and ESA’s education department and we really look forward to find ways to collaborate in a more comprehensive way.

Two key aspects have been highlighted during these meetings.

The first aspect is the importance of BIS-Italia Educational Rover Project, a project that will now be conducted in partnerships with Elettronica In (Futura Group). It has been presented as an original, and complete, educational and outreach project at all meetings, at the same time offering the opportunity to the Agencies and the Institutions to support it. The Project requires a lot of documentation effort as we are now endeavoring toward the second part of the project that will lead to connections with teaching electronics and space exploration. The connection between the Rover and the ExoMars programme is more than evident to everybody and we hope to play a significant role in educating about the next flagship mission of ESA and ASI.

The second aspect is the fact that our Society is really made and managed by both professionals and very serious enthusiasts. Alistair and Mark have such an extensive and high-level experience in the aerospace sector to be completely at ease in the complexity of the environments in which we presented the Society. Both of them have also exchanged many interesting stories with our members and I think we will remember the in depth explanations that Alistair gave about aircraft design, and those that Mark gave about Skylon and the Sabre engine. Colin and Steve represented the other side of the BIS, that of the serious and competent enthusiast that was borne from the golden age of spaceflight and that devoted a sensible part of their life to help the Society and foster interest in space exploration. All of them are outstanding examples of the value that the BIS represents internationally, and there is no doubt that everybody we talked to was very impressed by all this.