Mon, 7pm, University of Hong Kong

There's a scene in the blockbuster movie Apollo 13 in which a Nasa employee drops a bunch of parts on a table in front of some engineers and demands they get a square through a circle: if they don't, three astronauts will be left to the worst possible fate.

It is not often that similar situations come up in most people's lives, but for some that's a regular enough part of their job. Tom Logsdon is one of those people and will be giving a talk on his life as a rocket scientist in Hong Kong next week. Logsdon was responsible for retrieving the three Apollo 13 astronauts when part of their spacecraft exploded 338,000 kilometres from earth. He also made important contributions to the moon-landing missions.