Biography
Home and Career
Born in Chester, raised first in the wirral then further south as a kid, most of my formative years were spent in rural Gloucestershire at home or at Rendcomb College. I set out to University to study Electronic Engineering at the University of Birmingham, but rapidly discovered that it wasn’t for me. I went hunting for a course involving multimedia content at Birmingham, but came up empty and ended up moving to Demontfort University in Leicester. I knew I’d found the right thing. I also found Helen, the My Little Pony collecting, strong willed, posh-scouse girl whom I soon realised I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. After University we bit the property bullet and bought our home in suburban Leicester. Home to us, the odd ant, our beautiful but sadly departed cat Suzi, and the latest feline addition to the household, Gizmo.
Meanwhile, I followed Helen to the same medical e-learning company ( in a story that involves a Citroen 2CV, a pig called Bob and a field in Hampshire ) initially as an animator. Seven years later I’m still there, as a multimedia producer covering animation, filming, editing, media management, dvd production and so on. It’s a fascinating and occasionally frustrating job which has taken me to see some extraordinary things and meet some remarkable people.
Space Enthusiasm
The summer before I set out for University, Mars Pathfinder touched down. I. Was. Hooked. I had been interested in space before then - I even had a small 4 inch reflecting telescope (that has now found a new home courtesy of freecycle). Pathfinder, however, was something new. I think the engineering is what drew me to it. Sojourner was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I went to a local business that sold 56k internet access for $20 an hour and downloaded the early panoramas, printed them out on a 24 pin dot matrix printer and showed everyone. I even tried tidying up that rough and ready first panorama. I still today, have that rought and ready pan, as it was on the Pathfinder website, with channels not quite lined up, in a little frame. That image set me on a road that led to UMSF.
Fast forward to 2003 - I had set up a Yahoo! Group to discuss the Beagle 2 Lander. I hadn’t really looked into the Mars Exploration Rovers a great deal, but I loved Beagle 2. I sent a small good-luck card to the control team at the Space Centre here in Leicester. Clearly I cursed the whole thing because as history recalls, Beagle 2 failed. I didn’t know all the MER imagery was due to go online…but come Jan ‘04 - I saw these JPG coming down the pipe and thought ‘I should make some mosaics of this’ and did. Finding nowhere to share them, I downloaded and installed the Invision forum software onto some webspace I had set aside for some computer game things I had planned on doing - and this became mer.rlproject.com
Unmannedspaceflight.com
I don’t remember ‘pimping’ that old forum a great deal. Member 1 is me, 2 is Helen testing it out for me. 3 and 4 are two motorsport enthusiast friends of mine trying it out as well. However, people started visiting, discussing the images, sharing their own - and that’s how it went for 12 months. Slow growth. I added sub-forums for Cassini. Then other missions. Soon I realised that the site need to move to a proper hosting package of its own, and from somewhere ( again, I can’t remember how ) I came up with unmannedspaceflight.com - not as a statement against manned spaceflight ( of which I am a supporter ) - just because that’s what it was about.
I got some admins on board to help out, and then the odd email would arrive, from people I knew of ( scientists and engineers from NASA ) saying that they liked the forum and thought the stuff on it was great. At that point (and one email in particular ) I knew I had something worth looking after, and was the custodian of something special. From those emails came some fantastic opportunities - to meet some MER science team when they’ve visited the UK, and conduct Q’n'A sessions with them for people to download and listen to.
At the beginning of ‘08, on the 4th birthday of the forum, and as the clock ticked to 100,000 posts, I thought it was time UMSF left the hosting nest. The Phoenix landing of May ‘08 , and the swathe of lunar missions towards the end of ‘08 meant that the forum would be busier than ever and the cheap hosting package we had would be insufficient to cope. I put out an appeal, to ask for cash to rent a dedicated server of our own, hoping that by the Autumn we would have enough. It took less than two weeks. So at the beginning of May ‘08 - UMSF moved to its own server. This gives the potential to develop other projects around the UMSF ‘brand’.
Talk Talk Talk
Towards the end of 2004, I thought I would have a go at talking about the rovers to amateur astronomers. I did a talk about both rovers to the Leicester University Astronomy Society - and have since done many talks for local astronomy societies, schools, the British Astronomical Association and for 90 glorious seconds, the institution that is The Sky at Night.
One of my admin team at UMSF is The Planetary Societies Science & Technology Coordinator, Emily Lakdawalla. In the lead up to her planned maternity leave in the autumn of ‘06 - she asked if I would guest-blog for her on the societies website. I was at first nervous at the idea, but took the opportunity to represent the society at the International Astronautical Congress in Valencia and blogged my way through the week. Since then I have blogged again in Europe at the Mars flyby of Rosetta, and the Europlanet Conference in 2007 and 2008
The Goals
Space doesn’t pay. Well, not me at least. Hence everything you see here, the foundation and maintainance of UMSF - is all done in my spare time. It would be nice (but is currently not possible) to give up the day job to dedicate myself to science communication and bettering the relationship between the missions the taxpayer pays for, and the taxpayers themselves. I have plans, of course, to try and pull together the magnum opus for the Mars Exploration Rovers in the form of a book, and possibly a full-dome planetarium show. The problem being, these require so much time and effort that it’s near impossible to make progress whilst having a full-time job, and yet not until I complete such projects is the option of leaving the job a realistic one.
Europe lags behind American in outreach. Every image taken by the Mars Exploration Rovers is on the web, nearly 250,000 of them. Ditto Cassini. People know about these missions because of that. But I would wager significantly less than 50% of Europeans know that they have paid for currently active missions orbiting Mars and Venus. That’s an unhealthy situation to be in. Lacking a centralised outreach responsibility, ESA missions go hideously under-promoted. Because of the distributed nature of ESA, there isn’t a collective mandate for outreach for an instrument team. I want that to change. I don’t know how, but by giving papers at Europlanet highlighting the benefits of this heightened outreach effort that NASA is making, hopefully I can change some minds about how it should be done here!