He's famed in Hong Kong for helping design its contribution to space discovery - tools for the Mir space station and European Mars missions. Ng Tze-chuen recalls in our weekly series the highs and lows of 30 years working with celebrated scientists, battling bureaucracy ... and being tailed by spies
People often ask how I got involved in space projects. What they really want to know is why I wanted to be involved in such a profitless undertaking that took years to complete and required countless travels around the world.
It got to a point where I avoided talking to my friends about what I was doing because they always asked: 'How much do you get for it?' Instead of why, I wish more people would ask why not? I think in different terms. I am a daydreamer, and my best scientific ideas came out of daydreaming.
Here is an example. Dentists often drop inlays on the surgery floor, which have to be picked up. This was how I started conceiving automatic pickup devices that led to the territorial-sampling tools we developed for the Beagle 2 mission to Mars. That's the power of daydreaming. That was my apple-dropping-on-my-head Newtonian moment.
One thing many people, and government funding agencies, often don't understand is that inventions and scientific projects that may seem impractical often have spin-off applications beyond our wildest imagination somewhere down the road.
I believe it is not the duty of a scientific investigator to find immediate practical uses but always to push a viable concept forward until he or she can find no further improvement. In our case with Beagle 2, it took our Polytechnic University team more than a decade.
