?»?Born in 1958, I grew up with the Space Age. I was enthralled with the Moon landings and turned my bedroom into a museum celebrating the program. My pride and joy was a three-foot-tall Saturn V model that I made myself. I also had a corkboard with the mission profile on it (made out of construction paper), and I would pin the appropriate portions of the Saturn V to the corkboard to match the current status of the mission and the position(s) of the spacecraft.

In 1982 I was delighted to be hired by a contractor at the Goddard Space Flight Center to work on spacecraft simulations. (Ever since then, I've described my occupation as "fake-rocket scientist.") My first spacecraft, in fact, was the Hubble Space Telescope even before it was called Hubble. (A coworker my age and I looked at the long-term plans for Hubble and joked, "We could still be working on it when we're 40!" That stopped being a joke a long time ago.) I've moved in and out a bit, but for the past several years I've been back at Goddard and would be happy to retire there. Other missions I've supported over the years include Wind, Polar, RXTE, TRMM, Landsat-7, Aqua, Aura, EO-1, NPP, and the James Webb Space Telescope.

I've been honored with multiple NASA Group Achievement Awards, a Space Flight Awareness Award, and a Silver Snoopy.

I am very happy to support the National Air and Space Museum for the memories it brings me as I contemplate the Apollo and similar exhibits, the mockups of some of the spacecraft I worked on, and all of the other technological accomplishments that the museum does such a wonderful job of commemorating.