I found an interesting article about the career of “Rocket Scientist” on the web this morning. The whole article can be found here.

One of the nice quotes, right at the end of the text is this one:

“it’s not about money, “although that’s a factor, of course. This is an endeavour that attracts true believers, people with serious, long-term scientific objectives. It’s all about the intellectual allure of solving really hard problems. And hopefully, seeing what you’ve worked so hard on actually fly.”

I think one of first bits of hardware to fly that I actually handled were components for Cluster (of course, lots of those bits became part of the constellation of swamp sats – the initial launch that didn’t quite make it into Earth orbit, more like deep mud orbit). The good news was that the engineering model was one of the ‘phoenix’ satellites which were launched on the second try.

It does give you a nice feeling when you think that something you helped build is somewhere up there, doing real work and adding to our knowledge of the universe….