I am a retired electrical engineer who mostly worked on satellite electrical power subsystes. I started in the late 1970s at McDonnell Douglas (St. Louis) and retired in 2018 from Northrop-Grumman in Gilbert, AZ (formerly Orbital Sciences).Growing up in the 1960s while intensely following NASA’s Apollo program and watching Star Trek inspired me to be a part of the space program. My plan involved getting an engineering degree and finding a job building spacecraft. I took some college courses in astronomy to get a better understanding of what the spacecraft would be observing, and I spent three semesters as a co-op student, working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I was rather proud to be a nineteen-year-old with a NASA badge.That experience got me the McDonnell Douglas job, where some of my assignments included the Space Shuttle, several NASA science missions, and the X-30 National Aerospace Plane (NASP). When the space side of the business wound down in St. Louis, I transferred to an office in Maryland that supported NASA Goddard programs. That was a good move since I made many good connections with the NASA staff there.By this time, I had family in Arizona, and McDonnell Douglas was supporting Motorola’s Iridium communications satellite constellation near Phoenix. They needed people willing to relocate there, so I jumped on that chance. After Iridium wrapped up, I jumped to Spectrum Astro, a small space company in Gilbert, AZ. They were building satellites for the Air Force and NASA. There, I was the power subsystem lead for many projects, including various missile defense satellites, two NASA gamma ray science missions (Swift and Fermi/GLAST), Landsat 8, and ICESat-2.

My advice to early career folks is to have a “Plan B.” In your career path there will be events that affect your career that you have no control over. For me, that included the Challenger disaster (cancelled a lot of missions I could have worked on), our company losing a competition (which changed their business plan), and having your employer offer you a position in a different city. You need to keep your eyes open for such opportunities and always be thinking of “what if” scenarios. What if your company had sudden financial issues? What if a customer cancelled your program? What if your spouse had an unexpected health issue? What if your boss offered you an exciting new position but it was in an area you were not confident of your skills there? You need to keep these scenarios in mind and plan ahead should a change in direction be needed.