Welcome to simonvdb.be, my personal website! I’m Simon Vanden Bussche, 21 years old and an engineering student at the K.U.Leuven university in Leuven, Belgium. I’m doing a master in Electrical Engineering. The specialisation which I have chosen for this is microelectronics. Put very plainly, that means I’ll be learning how to design the chips you find in your laptop, iPhone or even your car or fridge.

For the 09-10 working year, I am the president of EUROAVIA Leuven-Brussel. We are the local chapter of EUROAVIA, the European Association of Aerospace Students, which celebrates its fiftieth birthday this year. In Leuven, our goal is to unite students who are interested in aerospace. Our main activities are lectures and visits to companies, military bases and air shows.

Every now and then, in between my other activities, this website gets updated with some things I have been busy with. These can range from travelling experiences to webdesign and from robots to the most recent movie I’ve seen. At times, I’m too busy or I haven’t got enough inspiration to write, but don’t despair, there will be more. It might just take a while . You can also find me on other on line places, like on Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm or Delicious.

As you may have noticed, I’m interested in a great number of things, like art, literature and movies, but also history, politics and nuclear physics. But my cup of tea is very much spaceflight and everything around it. Why do people need to go to the Moon, to Mars? Why do people need to go into space in the first place? How are we going to do that? When will the first person land on Mars? Are there profits to be made from space? All quite hard questions, but very important ones, and (at least for me) very interesting ones, be it from a technical, economical, philosophical or whatever other point of view. All in all, not the kind of questions you’re supposed to ask me when I’m relaxing on a sunny beach . Some interesting web pages, for ‘newcomers’ as well as true space geeks, are quite logically found on the ‘links’-page.

About this website

This website is actually version 3.0 of simonvdb.be. All of the things you can see here are based on the Wordpress platform, with some added functions thanks to plugins qTranslate (excellent multi-language support), NEXTGEN gallery, reCaptcha, Delicious Cached++ and Collapsible Archive Widget. Everything is designed for Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, and this website has also been tested on Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9 and some older versions of these browsers.