This Open Day comes at an especially exciting time for space, with long-laid plans soon to come to fruition, with final preparations underway for the first launch of Artemis around the Moon, the first step in an international programme set to return humans to the lunar surface.

Meanwhile the long-awaited flight of the NASA-ESA James Webb Space Telescope – the tennis-court-scale successor to the Hubble Space Telescope – will be taking place this year, due to be launched by Ariane 5 from French Guiana. And NASA’s DART spacecraft will lift off, beginning its daring mission to deflect an asteroid, to be followed up in turn by a close-up survey by ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence.