You need to have a good background in math and science, but you will not be able to get very far in your career if you cannot communicate your ideas. - Suzy Dodd She describes her first personal connection with space would be, When I was in the second grade our class would stop work and watch the various Apollo program landings. I particularly remember the Apollo capsule splashdowns with the frogmen jumping out of the helicopters to rescue the astronauts who had splashed down in the middle of the ocean. I remember being excited about this capsule because it had been in outer space. I thought all of this was cool and fascinating.
On a chilly March morning, Steve Howard, aged 65, is at work in his office on the northern edge of Pasadena, California. Two computer screens are squeezed on to his corner desk along with family photos, a tissue box and tins of Altoids Curiously Strong Peppermints. The office is in a quiet business park by a workaday main road. Next to it is a McDonald’s, where people linger for hours over a $1 coffee, seemingly to keep warm. Over the road there’s a scruffier burger joint, Jim’s, with an M missing from its sign – and, visible from Howard’s window, a landscaping supplies yard.
"For me, the highlights of Voyager were clearly the planetary encounters. All six of them were wonderful experiences where every day we saw and learned new things. We had a lifetime of discovery packed into each one."
I arrived at Caltech as an incoming graduate student in the late summer of 1967 and began work in the Space Radiation Laboratory, headed up by Robby Vogt and Ed Stone. I passed my thesis exam in March 1973 and I continued that summer with my thesis experiment, launching it on a balloon from Fort Churchill, Manitoba. It’s a long story, but something went wrong with the cut-down mechanism and we lost our experiment -- to the Russians! We did eventually get it back, but it was a hopeless pile of junk. So, I was put on a new project that was just starting -- the Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS) experiment for Voyager.