Sad to say all these missions are moving into the foggy future for me. In 2014 I will be 74. I guess I will have to take good care of myself if I want to see them return any data. I am happy I lived to see the dawn of the space age, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Pioneer, Voyager, Viking, Shuttle, ISS, and all the myriad of communications, landsats, and weather satellites that have been launched. Those were exciting times.

I’ve even been privileged to help build some of them. In my 34 years at Hughes I worked on Surveyor, OSO, Pioneer Venus, the Galileo Probe, Intelsat IV, Intelsat VI, HS308, HS-376, HS-393, HS-601, HS-702, and even a couple of Millsatar payloads. Plus a lot of things I have forgotten about. Retirement is nice, but I miss being in the thick of things.