At the Limit

Dr. James Green worked at NASA for 42 years during which time he was Chief Scientist and the longest serving director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. He had the overall programmatic responsibility for 31 NASA missions with highlights including the New Horizons spacecraft flyby of Pluto, the Juno spacecraft insertion at Jupiter, and the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Since then, he has Co-Founded a Virtual Reality space education platform called Metavisionaries.

Richard Hopkins started off as a mechanic for the Brabham F1 team in the 80s and then went to the McLaren F1 Team for 15 years making his way up to Operations Manager. He finished his career as Head of Operations at Red Bull Formula One Team, leaving F1 in 2015. He’s now a Professor of Practice at UNSW, the Team Principal for UNSW Solar Racing Team Sunswift and Director of P-One Technology which is an automotive innovation company.

Sophia Ahmed-Ashford was with Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team from 2019 to 2024 as an Electronics Development Engineer. She is now the Lead Electronics Engineer at Space DOTS® which is deploying the first comprehensive platform for space environmental intelligence to understand and predicting the environments where humanity will expand.

Bart Horsten is an Australian-Irish racing driver, currently competing in the BMW M2 Cup. Bart is also an active simulator driver for Aston Martin F1 with over 500 hours of testing experience. He previously drove for Hitech GP in BRDC British Formula 3 Championship and aims to be the first Australian DTM Champion.