You may have seen in the news at the beginning of May that Professor Colin Pillinger died suddenly, rocking the space community in which he had been a driving force for many years.
I first met him eight years ago when he interviewed me for my day job position when he promptly threw the rulebook out of the window and we ended up having a good old chat, much to the bemusement of the rest of the interview panel. One of the first things we worked on was his book "Space is a Funny Place" – can you imagine a better job for me than spending afternoons in The Open University library, trawling the microfiche archives researching and verifying facts!?
Colin was a man with real passion for science and pushing the boundaries of knowledge and technology beyond what people believed to be possible. He had extraordinary determination and spirit and a great wealth of stories, both hair-raising and funny. Those who witnessed our mobility scooter race across the campus when his new one arrived, which he won, are still laughing about it now.
One of the most humbling moments of my life was when we were in the clean room and he put one of the Apollo lunar samples in my hand and said "men risked their lives to bring this back".
I'm still expecting him to come round the corner of the office on his scooter for a chat or to call me with a challenge "do you remember…?" or "can you find…?"
If I could have added a reply to his mention of me in the acknowledgements of his last book, his autobiography "My Life on Mars", ' Karen, who looks after me like I was her fifth child', I could only have said how lucky I was to have worked with such a lovely man with such an amazing mind. I will miss him for a long time.
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