Mark Shipley:  

Life I'm still living in Thousand Oaks (2009), but it's certainly changed from what it was in 1979. It's still not a bad place to call home, even if the traffic and crowds have increased dramatically. Professionally, things are rolling along pretty well. I enjoyed a ten-year run working on a NASA project that had me living in Kauai from 2001-03. I was on the team that flew the solar-powered Pathfinder and Helios aircraft to almost 100,000 feet in 1995-2001, setting several records in the process, and was named on the patent that was awarded later. Never in my wildest dreams could I have expected to be part of something like this. While the loss of Helios during a test flight in '03 was a big blow, I was thrilled to be sent to Washington, D.C., in January of '07, to hang the surviving Pathfinder airplane in the new Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy museum next to Dulles Airport. Although this program is now a memory, I'm proud to have been a part of it. My immediate family is alive and well, and all--parents, brother and both siste...Expand for more