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Michael Drake The lab in 1973 was quite small. Now we have three large buildings. At the time we only had the old part of Kuiper, built by NASA in 1965. We didn’t even occupy the entire building; I don’t know how many employees we had then, but somewhere between 30 and 60 would be my guess. It was, from my point of view, a strange environment. My degrees were in geology. I’d had some experience at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory being surrounding by astronomers, and that helped a lot, because I had learned to talk to people in very different disciplines. In coming here, it was very much like that. Most of the people came out of the discipline of astronomy, but not all of them. It’s like the tower of Babel; you talk in your own language and your own jargon, and communicating across fields is surprisingly difficult. It took a few years before I think most of us began to understand what motivated the other ones, what we were really saying. I think it helped us to speak in clearer, plain English and minimize the jargon, because we came from such different backgrounds. |
Overall, it was stimulating; it was exciting. I loved Arizona from the beginning. I grew up in England and had 21 years of rain and clouds, so I was ready for at least 21 years of sunshine. Amazingly, I’m still here in 2007; that’s 34 years later. Robert Strom There were not very many people doing planetary science. We were probably the only ones that had a group, you know, a lunar and planetary laboratory, just to study the solar system. We were it, in the world. Now it’s developed into a world-class facility. There’s a department as well as a laboratory. We started teaching in the early seventies, and now it’s grown a lot larger. And the subject matter has grown enormously too. |
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