Interview: Denel Spaceteq engineer Jonathan Lun

On this episode of the TechCentral podcast, we chat to South African space engineer Jonathan Lun about being named winner of Singularity University's Global Impact Challenge Southern Africa for 2017. As part of his prize, Lun will travel to the US, where he will interact with some of the world’s greatest minds to create moonshot innovations with a focus on climate change. Lun, who has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, where his dissertation focused on "plasma thrusters" (vacuum arcs), won the prize for an audacious plan to use the metals in asteroids in order to bring them to Earth and mine them for valuable resources. Listen as Lun explains how it works, and also talks about his involvement in government's flagship EO-Sat1 Earth observation satellite programme.