We will discuss the Pamela experiment as a case study for an astroparticle physics experiment in space. The detector, housed on board the Russian Resurs-DK1 satellite is composed by many state-of-the-art detectors to identify the elusive component of antimatter in space in the energy range from 100 MeV to above 100 GeV: a Time of Flight system, a permanent magnet spectrometer with microstrip silicon tracker, a silicon tungsten calorimeter, a neutron detector and an anticoincidence system. W e will also discuss the difficulties and limits posed by a space borne experiment, the integration and launch campaign in the cosmodrome of Baikonur and the data handling and processing operations.