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I was born in 1969 in Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York. As a kid, I loved to draw and build things - my favorite toys were colored pencils, paper, Legos, and Erector sets. But art and design would not factor in my professional plans until much later in my life.

After a childhood spent in Europe and the United States, I graduated from high school as a directionless teenager. A day later, I entered the Air Force, ultimately to work on nuclear cruise missiles in Minot, North Dakota. I left the military in 1991 just after the first Gulf War, mainly to set sights on a career, though I had no idea what that would be. After a one-year stint as a driver with Airborne Express, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Omaha to earn a degree in political science. It was through this degree that I began to think about politics in a serious way. For reasons not yet clear to me, I decided to run for city council in Omaha, Nebraska in 1997. I ran against an incumbent named Lee Terry who, along with most folks, wondered why in the world I was running in a race whose outcome was certain: Terry won by a landslide. On the other hand, I learned a considerable amount. I spent only $900 on the campaign, money gathered from my personal account and by generous donations from people who probably knew I wasn't going to win. As I recall, Terry spent much more than that, around $17,000, having confessed to me that he had no idea what I was up to; this had less to do with clever, stealthy campaigning and more to do with a disinterested media. All I did was walk door to door, the hardest but best way to learn what the people are interested in, what they care about, and what they think of you as a candidate. I worked hard, along with friends and family, and received 4,200 votes to Terry's 18,000 or so. Republican Lee Terry, by the way, is now a member of the United States House of Representatives for the State of Nebraska.

After the election, I decided to pursue a career in space. Space is very important to me, though it has taken a long time for me to figure out why. Basically, I feel the greatest days for our civilization lie ahead, among the planets and stars. After all that we have experienced over the past 10,000 years, that's saying a lot. In 1997, I saw an opportunity to pursue my passion.

The only university in the world offering a masters degree in space studies is the University of North Dakota, so it became clear I was headed back to the state, this time to Grand Forks. After graduation in late 1998, I got a job as a defense policy analyst at SAIC working on issues related to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the Strategic Arms Reduction Talk (START) Treaties, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in support of U.S. Department of Defense policies and initiatives. You might wonder what space has to do with this job. Nothing really. I was hired mainly because of my background in the Air Force Reserve. From 1992 to 1996, while going to school, I was a bioenvironmental engineering technician with the 710 Medical Squadron at Offutt Air Force Base. In peacetime, my job essentially dealt with industrial hygiene and environmental sampling. My wartime training prepared me to be one of three in my squadron responsible for the detection and mitigation of contamination caused by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. This background was what attracted SAIC to me, with the added benefit that I might be able to bring in space work later down the line, which never happened. I left the company in 2000 and started working as a space industry analyst with Futron Corporation, a technology management firm based in Bethesda, Maryland. After Futron, I was a space consultant and freelance artist for a few years until receiving an offer to work for the Secure World Foundation in Denver, Colorado.

My first painting, executed in 1998, depicted an Apollo Command-Service Module orbiting the Moon. I was very pleased with the result, which was painted using poster paints applied on canvas. As each painting was completed in the years that followed, I learned not just about technique, but also about myself. I discovered, for example, that my paintings often seem cold, which is not how I feel inside about the subjects I care about. In the past several years I've been exploring different ways to convey my passion for space while retaining my own style, from painting to drawing to model building. This is incredibly difficult, because I think my talent is not yet capable of realizing my vision. One day, it will be. That is the journey I look forward to...

Me in 1976, apparently working on my first masterpiece.