A link sent by a friend in Namibia (Mike) led to a rabbit hole of exploration and a deep sense of wonder about how life is sometimes so interesting it is almost palpable. The things that connect us to one another, and the weaving and winding paths we follow in life, can be strange and unexpected. The link was about a 2023 data update to the spacecraft Voyager 2, launched in 1977 and now two billion miles from Earth in interstellar space. The link (Voyager 2 Software Update) got me thinking about friends, NASA’s Deep Space Network, and a maze of other things that revolve around people, friendships, and choices. Bear with me, and it may make sense by the time I’m done! This is a glimpse into an eclectic and interesting life, and there are a few points of intersection with people very much worth knowing.

I am one of the folks who believe everything is connected. It’s one part of my personal interpretation of a god. (Small “g”. That was a teaser for a future post!) The ways in which our lives twist, and the intersections with our interests and other people in unexpected ways, are often not visible but they plant seeds that don’t bear fruit until a few decades later. If we are lucky, those detours and “paths less taken” often put us in contact with people who become invaluable as deeply connected friends that turn out to be fascinating and incredibly rewarding.

That’s what Mike is for me.

Backtrack several decades to when I quit Honeywell as an engineering manager with a pending promotion to Project Manager just to turn down job offers from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Lockheed Skunk Works, and went to work as a salesman for ComputerLand selling and setting up early personal computers for my local ComputerLand franchise. Turning down those incredible companies to work as a computer salesman was widely viewed by a lot of people as near insane, and some people still do. It turned out to be one of the most pivotal choices in my eclectic life — a choice and a time about which I have no regrets, only “what ifs”.

(Note: I do have some regrets in life, but not many, and that’s not one of them. My personal belief is that my “life well lived” is bound to have a few regrets or I haven’t stretched my boundaries enough.)

When I made the choice to give up jobs with two of the most prestigious space and aviation technology companies in the world, I went to work for a local ComputerLand franchise owned by Gene and Shirley Thom. Gene had been an engineer for JPL for the Deep Space Network (the first intersection with the link that started this missive) and retired from JPL after a full career. Then he and Shirley bought a franchise that promised to be the latest “sure thing” when retailing technology products was just getting started. Right about then, personal computers, and the IBM PC, became a reality. ComputerLand, and many franchisees, became very wealthy. I was one of the wannabes in the getting rich part of that adventure. ComputerLand, and many franchisees, ultimately were viewed as a “flash in the pan.” As was I.

Shirley was an avid member of The Ninety-Nines, Inc., International Organization of Women, a women’s aviation group (the group is still very active). When I left their store after a year or so to work for ComputerLand corporate offices in finance I stayed in contact with Gene and Shirley. At one point I went with them on an air race, in their Cherokee, around the western U.S. My memories of that flight often come back to me when I drive around Southern Namibia where I lived for eight and a half years until recently. (That’s the second intersection.)

Before ComputerLand tanked, I left ComputerLand, Australia, after moving to Sydney (and THAT is a story on its own!), I went to work as an independent contract programmer. Shortly thereafter, a man I got to know when he was in charge of ComputerLand Corporation public relations contacted me (after he left ComputerLand) and I ended up as the CEO of a startup company named Antenna Technology (AT) in Fort Worth, Texas. AT wanted to design an easily manufactured home receiver/antenna to get TV signals from the then-nascent geostationary satellite TV/Dish systems like HBO in its early days. (Note the intersection here with radio signals to space!)

There were going to be two unique values to our product: UPS shippable (others were not, due to large antenna size), and self-aligning so a technician didn’t have to install and point it to a geostationary satellite—one that always stays over the same spot on earth so if you “aim” an antenna at it, it just stays on the signal. We had a computer engineer plucked out of Apple Computers to design the receiver unit and the computer driving the whole thing. Shortly after arriving, we hired Gene Thom (who had closed (or sold?) his ComputerLand store) to be our antenna designer/engineer. (Another intersection!) And the design and effort, and the team, worked! We had an operational prototype! Then, when oil prices tanked in 1986 we had to dissolve AT, and lay off about 30 employees, because the AT holding company used the entire AT line of credit with our banks to purchase additional stock in the oil industry just before oil prices dropped by over 50%. The holding company had technology recovering “heavy oil” believing the oil price reductions during the period 1981 to 1985 were temporary, and they would make a killing buying all that speculative stock. (This was in East Texas, unsurprisingly.) The only killing that resulted was that of Antenna Technology, Inc. And my stock was essentially worthless. The trend to notice here is the sudden decrease in my bank account and future prospects.

I went on for several years of surviving, sometimes flourishing, sometimes scrambling to pay bills. Once again losing my “life savings” with the dot.com crash of 2003 when was working as Manager of Consulting for Netcentives.com and my stock was added to my stack of potential wallpaper. Thereafter, I did pretty well in consulting/project management but never made my hoped-for fortune. In 2013 I had worked my way out of debt (again), but at age 63 was “less of a hot item on the job market” as they say. Plus, I was sick of corporate America having avoided it for much of the past 40 years or so, and regretting the times I didn’t avoid it. I wasn’t penniless, and thanks to a friend with a wonderful family who hired me to work with them as a family business, I was OK but had no prospects for a decent retirement.

Not having great economic prospects, and missing international travel and work that I’d had a lot of in the past few decades (that part isn’t included in this story), in 2015 I ended up being accepted by the U.S. Peace Corps working in Katutura, Windhoek, Namibia, for two years in Community Economic Development, then transferring to Oranjemund, Namibia, and extending my Peace Corps time to four years instead of the usual two. In Oranjemund, I met Mike. He became a very good friend in the six and a half years I lived in Oranjemund, owning a home there for over four years. I often was invited to have Christmas dinner with his family, and he and I would sit in his office just before the end of the day at the store he owned (with two other partners) once or twice a week and talk for ninety min or so about Africa, Oranjemund, politics, people, local news, world news, families, and often about our common passion, space and cosmology. Both of us were very lucky to find people with tendencies to geeky interests in that small town in a remote area of the Namib desert who had similar curiosities. A few days ago, about a month after I left Oranjemund, I spent an hour and a half video-chatting with him and reproducing some of the hours I spent in his office. It was great – I felt at home for the first time since leaving Oranjemund.

Yesterday he sent me (from Namibia to the U.S.) a link to an article about a recent software update that was sent to the Voyager 2 spacecraft. That’s the link in the first line of this article. It took over eighteen hours for the signal from Earth to reach Voyager 2 about two billion miles away! It takes about 8 minutes for light from the Sun to reach Earth. Think about it.

It seems almost as improbable that I would be sent into a deeply nostalgic memory of working in the Aviation Industry by a close friend in Africa about 15,000 kilometers away and in the Southern Hemisphere. Point being; an Engineering Sciences/Astrodynamics major and fighter pilot from the Air Force Academy ends up linked to a Scottish grocery store owner in Namibia by a link to the Voyager spacecraft and a trip into interstellar space! Losing my life savings a few times made a trip to Africa possible, where I was lucky enough to meet Mike and several other people from Namibia who became very good friends. I would have never met Mike, or the other amazing folks I know in Oranjemund, had it not been for the twists and turns of event-filled lives and accidental conjunctions. We just never know how things will turn out.

Honestly, how do people get bored?