I’m not really sure what started it all. Perhaps it was being put into a moral dilemma by my employer over their proposed sale of the Space division, and the state-of-the-art radar imaging satellite to the fifth largest defence contractor. It could have been just the ‘usual’ mid-life crisis at 43years of age. Or just waking–up one day and realising, with a little help from my wife, that maybe I wasn’t quite doing-the-right-thing with my life and work efforts.
I guess it started a long time ago, when I was a teenager who wanted to be a pilot in the British Royal Air Force. I was expected to get all the necessary academic qualifications, and went for interviews and testing - passing all bar one – it seems my eyeballs weren’t up to the task of spotting the baddie in the distance. So… not being able to pursue my first love, I had to find another one.
It sounded funky with a nice ring to it – rocket scientist, space cadet and chief spacecraft designer
Being navigator or an engineer just wasn’t good enough and I felt slighted I couldn’t get what I wanted so I thought of going one step higher – why not get into the space business, it sounded funky with a nice ring to it – rocket scientist, space cadet and chief spacecraft designer. Well, I got what I wanted – sponsored by British Aerospace Space and Communications Division at the age of 18, to complete an Aeronautical Engineering degree at Imperial College in London, one of the finest in Europe.
For my part in the bargain, all I had to do was get good grades, work for a year before my degree and for every summer in between. It was great, getting a guaranteed, well-paid job for a year before university, and all the summers too, tax rebates and tax-free sponsorship. There was a guaranteed job at the end of it and the opportunity to learn all the funky stuff…like spacecraft propulsion, how to design and test deployment mechanisms for antennas, how to simulate the launch vibration and the extremes of the space environment.
I had a great time, so much so that I stayed around for 2-3 years after finishing my degree and started to put down some roots – buying a house, looking for a serious relationship, it all seemed to be coming together – not to mention having the buzz of telling people what I did for a living.
It started to unravel a little though, just as the space business for commercial communications satellites went into a downturn and the British government declared they would not finance any human space activities. I could see the writing on the wall and decided to go back to university and get a Masters. I thought I would hedge my bets this time,…choosing a management degree and a university with more of a social life – something the first university one never really had. There was a bit of a girlfriend issue – but that is a story for another blog.
A year later, not only was the space business down the toilet but so was the rest of the British economy (in the late 1980s) but as chance would have it – I got a lucky break that changed my life dramatically. Having only enough money in the bank for one more mortgage payment, living back with my parents and renting out my house (which was now nowhere near worth what I had paid for it) and owing my brother lots of $$ for my year of study. I really did need a lucky break, one that actually came from sending off my resume for a European contracting job.
Well, I had intended to stay just long enough to make enough money to pay back my brother and return to Britain, but I finally stayed working in Europe for almost 5 years for high profile spacecraft companies, working on manned space projects and communication satellites.
I had the good fortune to meet a ‘breath of fresh air’ who, it turns out, was also a gale force wind on occasion too. After a somewhat torrid start to the relationship, it soon settled down into a more ‘normal’ life – if you can call living in third-party countries, learning to speak a ‘foreign’ language or two, hopping around apartments of major European cities and having to ‘endure’ hours of sightseeing, eating and drinking…
After a short sojourn in Florida for me, Rome for my partner and Clearlake (Houston) for both of us with me working on the International Space Station, we found ourselves back in Paris. I had a great job working for a satellite telecoms customer organisation and my partner was working for her old company that just so happened to have moved from Rome to Paris.
It was quite the shock to go from business class travel in a Euro-high tech telecoms organisation to travel overnight on a bus with little sleep and some foreign music screeching at full blast over the stereo system.
However, by now that ‘breath of fresh air’ had picked up some momentum, and was determined to travel the world with, or without me. Maybe the life of living with a square Brit engineer didn’t quite fit into the vision of the West Coast Canadian enviro-journalist-freedom fighter-ecowarrior-animal activist. So, it was off to see the World and for almost 8 months we travelled through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia (twice), Singapore (twice), Indonesia, Bali, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii.
It was quite the shock to go from business class travel in a Euro-high tech telecoms organisation to travel overnight on a bus with little sleep and some wailing foreign music screeching at full blast over the stereo system. I guess it was to keep the driver awake and it is unfortunate that iPods weren’t around at the time. I’ll leave the rest of that adventure for another blog.
After surviving the travel, with only minor itches and ailments, and feeling enlightened by the experience (in pocket and soul), we started to settle into life in Victoria, BC. I still had the aerospace bug, that didn’t seem to get cured by any antibiotics I had to take whilst travelling, and so I set about finding some work on the West Coast.
There wasn’t much call for spacecraft engineers in BC at the time so I ended up back in Paris, minus my partner who was now busy studying in a photo-journalism school. I had another shot at my old job in Paris but this time employed directly by the company with no middle-men taking their cut. Good times were rolling along but it was hard on the relationship – calling from open phone booths in the street (in the days before cell phones, no normal people had them really - apart from those really mega-rich business types). I even slept on a friend’s sofa for 4 months – saved a tonne of cash and made for going to the pub with him a lot easier to organise.
Some 6 months later, with a wad of cash in the bank I returned to BC, but this time with a job offer. It was to work on RADARSAT-2 for Macdonald Dettwiler and Associates as the lead mechanical engineer in the project. So begins the saga with which I started. It was great fun at first, having to buy a new car, buy a house (in Victoria, BC) but working in Vancouver meant a long ferry ride or a Monday-to-Friday stay away from home. The project was meant to be for two years but lasted almost nine in total due to political pressures, technical problems and a somewhat naïve and inexperienced prime contractor.
I had a lot to do, and being a workaholic (still not in recovery), I busted my arse and did a good, maybe even great, job. I also was instrumental in setting-up the mechanical design department for MDA Space Division in Vancouver and supervised up to six people on the project. I think I did a good job as a supervisor, everyone seemed to like me – though I am not so sure others in the department did. I am sure I stepped on a couple of their toes occasionally.
I got to work with some fabulous engineers in Canada, Italy, Germany, the US, Russia and many other places too. It was a hard slog sometimes, and some guys bit the dust along the way, with only a handful of us from happy beginning to bitter-sweet end.
Why bitter-sweet you ask? Well, I will tell you all the gory details.
We all put our heart and soul into RADARSAT-2, a state of the art spacecraft that was meant, at least in our minds, and that of the public, to be in keeping with the Canadian Space Agency mission. This mission is “To promote the peaceful use and development of space, to advance the knowledge of space through science and to ensure that space science and technology provide social and economic benefits for Canadians”. I therefore felt assured that RADARSAT-2 would be used overwhelmingly for civilian and commercial applications.
The master plan was to sell off RADARSAT-2 and the MDA space division, all 1900 employees, to the highest US bidder. It just happened to be the fifth largest US military defence contractor - ATK.
MDA had other ideas. MDA got into the market of providing home information packages for home sales in the UK, mega bucks for pressing some computer keys and stuffing existing info into nice presentation folders…lots of $$ with few employees and none of that difficult mechanical and electrical stuff that got so delayed and dragged down the bottom line. That was upper managements’ position – the truth of course is really somewhat different. Anyway, the master plan was to sell off RADARSAT-2 and the MDA space division, all 1900 employees, to the highest US bidder. It just happened to be the fifth largest US military defence contractor - ATK. This didn’t go down too well with many people and not with me either.
But – you’ve just read that I was a wannabe fighter pilot and aerospace geek – why would I mind? In fact, wouldn’t it be good to work for such a large US organisation. Well, perhaps that might have been the case (though I think I might have still had some niggling doubts) if I had not had the pleasure of being ‘unsquared’ over the years to realise that this really was going a bit too far. Throw in the mix the fact that RADARSAT-2 would now be the property of this US defence contractor, and be much more ‘user-friendly’ for access by the US government and US Air Force, things were going downhill fast.
I felt my only option was to resign. The main reason was the uncertainty over the possible future use of RADARSAT-2. This gave me great concern about the moral implications of having contributed to a technology, originally in good faith, that would largely be used in non-military applications, but that could now be operated and accessed by an organisation whose corporate headquarters was a major weapons manufacturer and with a political direction coming from outside of Canada.
It was an unfortunate and regrettable end to my nine years working with MDA (and twenty-three years in the space business) where I had made so many good friends.
Firstly, I became a hippy (sort of) by settling into Saltspring Island life, a hippy paradise from the 70s, while my body, mind and soul, recovered from the MDA and RADARSAT-2 trauma.
So now what…where could a middle-aged, ex-space geek find another buzzy career but this time not make something that could be subverted from its original intention and used to harm people. I guess there were lots of options – a cushy government job pushing keys on a computer and avoid making any important decisions, move into health care – maybe there was a market for high-tech limb replacement mechanisms, except not many people have the cash for bionic body parts. No, it had to be something a bit more realistic but also altruistic.
Firstly, I became a hippy (sort of) by settling into Saltspring Island life, a hippy paradise from the 70s, while my body, mind and soul, recovered from the MDA and RADARSAT-2 trauma. I lost some weight, my blood pressure went back to normal and I think my hair even started to turn from grey to brown…pity it didn’t grow back but I am forever hopeful.
Secondly, I decided on a new buzz career – renewable energy, after all, the world is going to need this, a lot more than it needs another spacecraft illuminating the planet with a few hundred more TV channels. It is all the rage - solar, wind, ocean and geo power, energy efficiency, green buildings and lots more great stuff to get expert in. Nice idea, but how do I actually get involved, get a job and make a living in an arena I know not very much about.
So here comes the third decision – a PhD of course, how else can I get to the top of the renewable tree, have a great career, feel confident I really do know what I am talking about and get some valid credentials too. It had to be a special PhD, so I managed to find one that involved modelling the electrical grid, adding in existing and future renewable energy generation and the effects of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The end shot is to try and show that, with some funky planning, some tweaking here and there, that it will be possible to phase out some carbon-dirty power stations that BC gets its power from during peak load periods.
If I can do that, it would have been time well spent and a little payback to mother Earth for all those spacecraft that I helped put up into space. I am sure that some of the space hardware has been useful for some people, and I had hoped RADARSAT-2 was going to be a great asset for monitoring climate change and helping us make the right choices in fixing global warming. Now with a future PhD and a career in renewable energy hopefully I get to earn some good karma for the next life.
Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specialising in renewable energy, power grid modelling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites.
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