January summary: travels to new places and Cornwall’s space disappointment

Barbara and I are spending 10 days with Jon and family at the moment, in their new home in Luxembourg, the small European country, only three quarters the size of Cornwall, surrounded by Belgium, Germany and France. While Jon works from home, Kathryn is Director of the European Space Resources Innovation Centre at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. 

Luxembourg has a rich history, with narrow medieval streets, castles and densely forested hills, but it also has a more recent industrial past, having its own iron ore mines and steel industry. The Luxembourg ore contained only around 34% iron, however, and in the second half of the 20th century ore from Sweden, Mauritania and Brazil, containing up to 74% Fe, became a viable option, and the last of the country’s iron ore mines closed in 1981.

It is a surreal experience to walk down the main shopping precinct just off the main road in the country’s second city, Esch-sur-Alzette, and to see the two giant blast furnaces of the Belval steel works towering over the shops and cafes. The last one closed in 1997 but they were both left as a monument to the industrial glory days.

We were away roughly half of January. The first two weeks of the month we spent in the Spanish Canary Islands,  located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. After a few days on the island of Tenerife we took the short ferry journey westwards to La Gomera, the third smallest of the eight main islands of this volcanic archipelago and the only one that has not had any volcanic activity in the last 2 million years. This prolonged inactivity has allowed much erosion, producing deep gullies and dramatic contours rising to an altitude of almost 1500 metres, and the drive from the ferry terminal at San Sebastion across the mountains to our base at Playa de Santiago was truly spectacular.

La Gomera is famed for its hiking trails

The rugged La Gomera coast. In the background is Tenerife's Mount Teide,
whose summit is the highest point above sea level in the islands of the Atlantic

While we were in La Gomera there was bitter disappointment in Cornwall on the 9th of the month when the much antipated  inaugural orbital space launch from the UK ended in failure. 

Virgin Orbit's jumbo jet, Cosmic Girl, took off from Cornwall’s Newquay airport with  the LauncherOne rocket attached beneath its wing. It flew up to 10.7 km where the rocket detached and blasted off to hopefully put nine satellites into orbit at an altitude of 555 km.

The rocket appeared to be ascending correctly but then suffered an "anomaly" and the rocket and  the satellites it was carrying were lost, but the carrier jumbo jet returned safely to base. Hopefully further launches  will be attempted over the next 12 months, although the failure has cast doubt over future missions.

Last month was the first January since 1988 that I have had no involvement with Minerals Engineering journal. My 35 year tenure officially ended on December 31st. The journal was a major part of my professional life, interesting and challenging (see YouTube), which gave me many opportunities to travel and to meet many interesting people around the world, no more so than Dean Eastbury, who was my Executive Publishing Manager for eight and a half years. Dean became a great friend, not only to me but to the family, so I was pleased when Christopher Greenwell, Publishing Director for Chemical and Environmental Science & Engineering at Elsevier, invited Dean and his partner Penny, and Amanda and husband Richard to share a retirement dinner at our old conference venue, the St. Michael's Hotel in Falmouth.

Barbara, Amanda, Richard, me, Penny, Dean and Chris

And finally, it is not often we get the white stuff in Cornwall, but when we do, as we did mid-month, the industrial landscape is transformed. The wonderful drone photo below, in the Camborne mining area, is courtesy of https://3deepmedia.com

On our return from Luxembourg I will be travelling again only two weeks later, this time to Denver for the Annual SME conference and exhibition. I hope to see some of you there!

@barrywills