Recently, I have been thinking a lot about charting new paths, and especially about the difficulty and the rewards of doing so.

The three pictures below were taken during some recent mountain hikes in Utah and demonstrate the point: charting an entirely new path takes many times more energy, much more perseverance, and an almost incredible amount more strength than any other way we might take. But it also takes people who follow and are willing to explore beyond.

Look at the first picture, taken 1-2 days after 1-2 feet (30-60 cm) of new snow. I was trying to open up a path with my hiking shoes. Every step I fell in, with snow to my knee…

When Administrator Charlie Bolden interviewed me for my job in the fall of 2016, he started the meeting with a surprising question: “Thomas, why would you want this job? You are leaving a tenured position and you may be fired within a few months as the administration changes.” I reflected for a moment and answered, “because it is better to have an impact on this amazing program for a few months than to have no impact at all.”

This December, I will resign my position at NASA…

As part of my studies in Astronomy at the University of Bern circa 1990, I had to learn how to measure very accurately positions and angles of stars in the sky. During a practicum class, we could apply the content within the classroom, and one of these experiments was to measure accurately, during the night, the angle between a telescope on the roof on the astronomy institute and a point near a local hotel called Kursaal.

I was reminded of that today when I stood on the roof of that hotel and looked in the direction of the university. I marked the points of university and hotel with red arrows.

There are two reasons this was meaningful to me today…