Two years later, JPL's Voyager spacecraft began returning fantastic images of Jupiter and her entourage. Even the busy problem-solvers at Caltech peeked up from their work and smiled in delight. It was a heady time to be an engineering student! Later that year JPL graciously offered me a part-time position as a draftsman of the Galileo spacecraft schematics and I found myself inside the very picture I had envied a more than a decade earlier - I had finally graduated!

My first decade at JPL revolved around spacecraft computers and advanced computer architectures. It was fascinating work, but technologically a long way from computers as intelligent as "HAL" from "2001: A Space Odyssey." I went on to be the lead engineer for the computers used on the Cassini spacecraft. Later I found that designing "fault protection" would be a lot of fun and spent two interesting years thinking about how to make Cassini diagnose failures and repair itself during its long lonely voyage to Saturn.