![[an old ex-rider]](self-picture.jpeg)
Once long ago in what sometimes seems must have been another world, I graduated from New Mexico State University and had a job waiting for me at Boeing in Seattle. Whee! We did things like that in those days.
So Sue Lynn and I and our toddler son drove to Seattle where we had three days to find an apartment. We did, and I started work in a barely-refurbished former factory converted into huge bays of engineers, typists, technicians, supervisors, managers. Oh, I think we had draftsmen and a typing pool in there as well. And noise! Lots of noise!
I don't know what I'd thought engineering was going to be or what I'd thought I'd be doing, but what I found was lots of reading and writing reports and making suggestions and having some committee that I never saw evaluate those suggestions. "Surely there's a better way to work," I thought.
If there are gods of engineering, perhaps they heard me.
My supervisor apologised to me, but I had the least seniority in the group and no one else wanted a particular job that had come up in a project to map the moon.
Crimeney! I felt like I had walked into science fiction.
Geeminey! I got to help plan the trajectories that the spacecraft would take to get to the moon and I got to help plan the orbits the spacecraft would fly so we could map the moon. I say trajectories and orbits:: we flew five Lunar Orbiters in a sequence and we did map something like 98.5% of the moon's surface. Those maps were used by astronauts to help plan their missions when they looped the moon and when they landed on it.
We did such a fine job that I was sent to Houston to...well, we never did figure out what we were doing. I worked on a little of this and a little of that, and made several recommendations that were ignored. After a very frustrating year, I quit and went back to New Mexico State University for graduate work in physics. I did earn a master's degree in physics, and I did all the classwork for a Ph.D. But I did not earn that Ph.D.
A good friend from the old days on Lunar Orbiter called me up with a sort of offer of a job back in the unmanned exploration of space. He was part of a group of brilliant engineers working at Martin Marietta on the outskirts of Denver who were helping NASA turn plausible missions into actual missions for spacecraft to study Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Might I be interested?
I was sorely tempted. I went up and met his supervisor and lead engineer, a charismatic and volatile engineer named Gentry Lee. (Gentry Lee has distinguished himself on many missions since then as an engineer then a manager and apparently is still doing so.) He offered me a job and I accepted and began a wonderful couple of years, maybe three, working in that group.
Then I was sent to Los Angeles to help plan and execute the Viking Missions to Mars.
Goddam! I honestly was living in science fiction!
After Viking, I got to work on Voyager, a mission to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. I helped plan it, and I helped execute it.
But there were too many of us working on the project when we got to the long quiet time coasting to Saturn, so I was let go and picked up by a project that was going to go to Venus.
Alas, bright people do not always get along well. I soon found myself in conflict with the managers of that mission and found it expedient to leave.
No, not go to another project going somewhere else. I quit working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and never worked again in the unmanned exploration of space.
But damn it was good while it lasted!
And I tried programming as an independent contractor, then worked for an insurance company to finish off my career. It was a good and interesting voyage.