Don Kessler

In 2001, I finally left the Houston area for good. After we retired, my wife and I agreed that we’d both like to live in the mountains of North Carolina, so we moved to Asheville and have never regretted it. We enjoy the friendly people, the beautiful scenery, and recreation that includes snow skiing, hiking, and white water rafting. Most of all, we enjoy the mild outdoor climate … so much that I’ve even learned to play golf. But retirement’s greatest joy is having the time to become involved in interesting activities such as politics, economics, electronics, home improvement projects, and lately, enjoying my (much older now) high school friends … although there seems to be less time for enjoying these pleasures than there was just after I retired from NASA, eleven years ago.

The rest of the story:
I couldn’t afford to go to college after high school, so I joined the Army to learn about surface-to-air missiles. After a few 3 a.m. shifts of guarding them, I vowed to find a day job when I got out. So I started college in 1961, courtesy of the National Defense Student loan program, married in 1963, and graduated with a B.S. in physics in 1965 with the additional help of NASA’s Cooperative Education Program. At that point, I had the choice of graduate school or full time work at NASA; I chose NASA, doing research to define the interplanetary meteoroid environment.

Working at NASA during the early days was as much fun as retirement is today. It was like having a hobby supported by the budget of the U. S. government. By the late 70’s, my research into the government’s contribution to the space debris environment became controversial but, fortunately for me, government bureaucracy made it difficult to fire me. With time, NASA’s management began to see value in the research, and in 1980 I was allowed to officially organize NASA’s orbital debris program. We started involving international partners in 1990. As much as I enjoyed the experience, I eventually got my fill of the travel and the growing bureaucracy.

By the mid-90’s NASA was becoming even more bureaucratic and I found myself doing more paperwork than research…NASA just wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. So in 1996, as NASA’s Senior Scientist for Orbital Debris Research, and having been promoted to my level of incompetence, I decided it was time to take advantage of the government’s retirement plan and find something more fun. While most of my colleagues will remember me for my technical publications, I may end up being most identified with the “Kessler Syndrome” as a result of a colleague’s flip comment to a reporter.

My personal life wasn’t as successful, although it wasn’t bad…I was divorced and remarried and divorced again by 1978. So after two marriages I decided it was time to enjoy being single, which I did for the next nine years…. until I met Lynn. We’ve been together for 20 years, and I couldn’t be happier.