Here are three logos for the to be established National Singapore Space Agency – the www.nssa.gov.sg is not set up yet, but www.space.gov.sg is. Images were generated via reve.com and are on a CC0 license – do as you please.

Why does this excite me?

A nine-year-old living along Commonwealth Crescent in Queenstown in 1969, was watching the NASA Apollo 11 moon landing on their family black and white TV. That nine-year-old was me.

I was mesmerised by what I was seeing and I wanted to become an astronaut and also to go to the moon. I worked towards that dream by reading all that I could about space, engineering etc via books from the Queenstown Public Library. There were lots of questions I did not get good answers to (like how does one navigate in space where you can’t really use a compass etc). Suffice to say, a lot of those questions got answered years later.

I was told that since we did not have a space program, the best path forward was to see if I could get into NASA somehow, which I was told would be hard for a foreigner.

What was the next best thing to that? Aerospace engineering. I figured if I can get an aerospace engineering qualification, I could find a way to join NASA and somehow get to go to space.

But, aerospace engineering was not available in the local universities, which prompted me to look at the next closest thing: electrical engineering. So that was what it was. Do an electrical engineering program, and from that get to aerospace and NASA.

Suffice to say, I only succeeded in step 1 – getting an electrical engineering qualification. While getting that, ARPAnet happened and that opened up a whole new arena and a very different trajectory for me – cyberspace.

Fast forward to 2026. Singapore will be setting up a space agency to be called the National Singapore Space Agency later this year. Nothing in the announcement does it say that it will get Singaporean astronauts, but at least it is a start. I hope that it will spark interest in school children of the possibilities of space including space travel.

Here’s a talk I gave at NTU in 2007 as part of the Village Talks series (yeah, it is low-res):

Let get going. We have waited a long time.