• Question: what would you do if you were given a small grant of a million dollars

    Asked by Conner Mottershead to Abbie, Melanie, Stu on 17 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Stuart Inglis

      Stuart Inglis answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      Hi Connor,

      Wow that’s a lot of money! I’d start an engagement project with lots of schools to try and design and build an Iron Man suit. It would work a lot like the Bloodhound SSC project (http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/) in terms of engaging lots of different people and schools but we’d build a flying, suit rather than a very fast car!

    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      Difficult question! One million dollars doesn’t actually go that far in Mars Rover terms…

      I think I would probably put it into some of our spin-off projects, that are much less well funded. We’re trying to use the technology that we’ve developed for the rover to feed into other, more day-to-day things. For example one idea is wheelchairs that can climb stairs. Even if they do it slowly, just being able to get up a few stairs can change a lot for people with mobility issues… And because it’s not a part of our core business, we rely on grants and research and development money to fund studies like that, and money is always hard to get hold of. So your million dollars would be great for that, thanks! 😛

    • Photo: Melanie Zimmer

      Melanie Zimmer answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      There are two things I would like to support – a project like the Blue Brain Project (http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/), where they look into creating a synthetic brain, and researching into creating Transformer cars would be amazing (the first is probably more feasible at the moment, but as researchers and engineers we have to be creative)! A million dollars does sound like a lot of money, but when it comes to research projects… they can even go into billions!

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