* Astronomy

Michel Courtois is a man with a mission. One of the continent's leading experts on space exploration, he is the individual charged with the awesome responsibility of co-ordinating Europe's campaign to put itself back on the galactic map.
The scale of the challenge facing him doesn't stop there. There can be no question that attempting to keep pace with the monolithic space programmes run by the US and China is a task that most men would quail at, but as the head of the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Research and Technology Centre he has also set himself an even loftier goal: persuading Scotland that it needs a space programme of its own.

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