I flew fighters for 20 years including combat hunting and killing surface to air missile sites. But I eventually discovered this was a young man;s sport. I then started work on building and testing the initial production of the B2 bomber - a sophisticated flying computer exposed to extreme flying and environmental conditions (+120F to -65F). I chose not to enter the mundane world of aircraft production after testing was complete, so I entered the world of simulator development. My initial entry into this field was a B2 simulator, but soon moved on to developing simulators to train astronauts on systems still in development stage. Having proven that I could master this field (we discovered a software glitch with the flight software and taught the astronauts how to work around it) for the first seven increments of building the space station, I moved over to astronaut training in a weightless environment. This was fun - developing replicas of shuttle and space station systems that would exist sometime in the future. Then the program started coming to a halt with the completion of the space station and I got bored with routine training. I then started working with the European and Japanese space agencies to develop unmanned robotic space vehicles to carry supplies to the space station. I traveled extensively to Europe and Japan working with these agencies to build and test their vehicles.. Those vehicles have successfully flown to the space station carrying their cargo. Now I am stuck in a maintenance mode for those vehicles and bored. I have taken up horse and cattle ranching to fill the voids I now experience.
I succeeded in each of these fields because I would not accept defeat; I always found a solution. But I ignored me and those around me.
Intelligent but not always smart.
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