“You can read everything there is to know about driving a car, but you won’t really understand what it’s like to drive one until you get behind the wheel. That’s what it’s like to fly your software in orbit,” says David Evans, ESA’s OPS-SAT Space Lab manager.

Over the last year, 12 project teams have had the chance to experience this first hand thanks to a combination of seed funding from the Discovery element of ESA's Basic Activities and access to ESA’s experimental OPS-SAT CubeSat.