Dreaming of what is to come

It was a day like any other. Well, that is to say, all days this February are pretty much the same, caused by a lockdown due to the ongoing corona pandemic. It therefore should not raise any questions that what would happen would definitely liven up today. However when waking up this morning I of course did not know this. The morning therefore started as usual, getting woken by the boys, making breakfast, brushing their teeth and bringing them to school. All the while dealing with Daniel’s enthusiasm for his upcoming birthday (he has been anticipating this so much.. as I will explain in a later post). After the schoolrun, the day progressed pretty much as normal: stuck behind my desk working on novel ways to monitor biodiversity with satellite observations. While normally I find the time (in-between online-meetings and paper-reviews) to fetch a espresso and browse through the news of the world a bit, today is not such a day. Perhaps that is because my work for Lifewatch now has finally reached a level where I again can focus on what I find interesting. Specifically, ever since I started working for Lifewatch in November, my research has been focused on examining high-level (United Nations) policy briefs on how they see the role of remote sensing for biodiversity monitoring. While this does provide me with interesting results (some of which I hope to publish soon), such a review does focus on actually developing novel remote sensing techniques. Instead, this top-down analysis has provided me over the last couple of months with information on ‘what is actually required of remote sensing’. Now that I have answered this question, I have been able, over the last couple of weeks, to focus on the actual research of ‘how this can be accomplished with novel techniques’ and ‘what is required to achieve this’, something which is much closer to what I would like to do. As such, the happenings of the world go by me…. that is until around five o’clock in the afternoon, when I finally manage to break free from my work, inspect the news a bit, and get blown away by what is posted on the frontpage! Ever since I was a little boy, my biggest dream has been to become an astronaut and contribute to exploration of space. In my boyish view of the world, becoming an astronaut would combine my spirit for adventure together with my devotion for progressing science forwards as well as my love for rockets, science fiction & space-travel movies. The pursuit of this dream has lead me to start take up stargazing, study Applied-Physics, perform an internship on examining the booster-rockets of the Ariane-5 rockets, execute a PhD research in satellite remote sensing, and finally my application in the previous ESA astronaut selection round in 2008. Although I was not selected (not surprising considering in total 5000 other people also applied), this ‘failure’ did not diminish my dream. Far from it. In fact, I can truly say that not a month has gone by since 2009 that I have not looked at the ESA’s webpage to catch a glimpse on when they would open up the next round. As you can imagine, seeing the news for which I have been praying for over 10 years, exhilarates me as a little school-boy. Naturally, I immediately start to examine all the information provided on the ESA website, browse through all the news-articles I can find and think on how I would handle my application this time to ensure a better success than last time. Throughout this all, I can barely contain my excitement, to the point that I am unable to fall to sleep until the night has progressed into morning. Dreaming of what is to come…