A little over a week ago (as of this writing), I was staying in a nice Hyatt hotel in downtown Pasadena, across from the Convention Center, where my wife was attending the ‘Lightbox Expo’ animation convention (she teaches animation and art), which I was not attending. I only tagged along to be with her, and because I love downtown Pasadena.
I brought my laptop to write my tribute on the late Tom Skerritt, but I also had some time to browse and enjoy the city, so I chose instead to visit one of my favorite haunts; The Battery Books & Music store. I walked out of The Battery with a few treasures, including the original novelization for Gene Roddenberry’s obscure 1973 failed pilot, “The Questor Tapes,” written and autographed by the late, great Dorothy C. Fontana (!).
Planetary Society Headquarters in downtown Pasadena.
I also hoped to take a quick peek inside The Planetary Society headquarters; a nonprofit space exploration group cofounded 46 years ago by the late Carl Sagan to which I’ve had membership now for nearly 30 years. I’ve been to about six of the group’s Planetfest events over the years, where I’ve met a few fellow members (and space-advocating celebrities) past and present, including our former CEO Bill Nye, Robert Picardo, Tim Russ, John Rhys-Davies and Ray Bradbury. I’ve even ‘attended’ a virtual Planetfest that took place online during the COVID pandemic in 2021. Though I live only about an hour or so away from Pasadena by freeway, I’d never actually taken a look inside of Planetary Society headquarters (PS HQ), which has relocated from its original cottage house locale to its current address on Los Robles Ave back in 2015.
Normally, you’d schedule a visit, which is still the best method for a tour. However, I plead guilty to being impulsive every now and then. So, I had an idea that maybe I could just ring the doorbell sometime during business hours on Friday, take a few quick pics of the lobby, and leave. That was my modest goal for visiting PS headquarters that week–which was right outside my hotel lobby’s side-entrance, directly across the street.
The Lightsail 2 solar sail mission (2019-2022) is prominently and proudly featured you as you walk in.
On Friday, I walked by PS HQ and saw a single car parked there. On impulse, I rang the doorbell of this former bank building, and to my surprise, a lone staffer answered. He explained most of the staff works from home now unless needed, but kindly gave me permission to take a few photos of the lobby when I mentioned my longtime membership. After a brief chat about the “Star Trek Jupiter globe” (more on that in a bit), I thanked him, and left. I made sure not to overstay my admittedly unannounced visit. I then visited The Battery, and went back to my hotel across the street. Mission accomplished. So I thought…
The next morning, I decided to hit the Paseo shopping complex on the same block as my hotel and catch a movie at its Regency Theatre (the same theater where I’d met Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin at a Planetary Society event in 2009). After showering and freshening up, I walked down to the lobby of the hotel, where a table and chairs labeled for The Planetary Society had been set up outside of a conference room. Curiouser and curiouser…
Running into my Planetary Society CEO Jennifer Vaughn (she prefers Jenn) in the very lobby of the hotel in which my wife and I were staying. She would later say it was “serendipity” was placed me here on the very day the PS was holding this Roundtable Discussion, of which I was unaware (that’s what I get for skimming emails instead of reading them…)
Walking by the table, I recognized the PS’s new CEO (and former COO) Jennifer “Jenn” Vaughn. Naturally, I just had to say hello, so I introduced myself, and told her I’d been a member since early 1997. She then told me she’d joined about the same time, in late 1996. Quick to using first-names, Jenn is very affable, and recently stepped up to fill the formidable shoes of Bill Nye, who stepped down as CEO to become a goodwill ambassador, with Jenn stepping up to run this global nonprofit organization. She’s doing an amazing job, too.
Donor Relations Officer Robin Young and Senior Executive Assistant Ariel Barrero were handing out name tags for the other preassigned guests. They made me feel welcome, even though I was a last-minute addition.
Jenn then asked where my love of space exploration started. I told her it began with science fiction as a little kid, but reached critical mass when I saw the first Viking lander photos from the surface of Mars at age 10 in the January 1977 issue of National Geographic. Mars became real to me that day. It was no longer a place of sci-fi or fantasy. At the table, PS volunteers Robin Young (Donor Relations) and Ariel Barrero (Senior Exec Assistant) immediately created a name-tag sticker for me, and Jenn asked if I could repeat what I’d just said to a conference room discussion. Even as a PS member, I didn’t realize this event was taking place, let alone at my very hotel. At first, I was embarrassed, and sheepishly explained I was on my way out, but Robin gave me a sticker anyway as a “keepsake.” As I walked away and headed toward the theater, I stopped and said to myself “What the hell am I doing?”
The roundtable discussion (or oblong tables–hehe) had many varied types; engineers, teachers, a filmmaker, a college student, and even a few laypersons, like myself; with no technical or scientific background.
Turning back, I put on my name-tag and poked my nose into the hotel conference room, where I was welcomed by Jenn and a group of around 20 fellow PS members. Jenn asked me what happened with my plans, and I told her I blew them off, because I really wanted to be here. With that, I was seated near the front of the conference room, just as the group was sharing their experiences with joining the PS and how we all become fellow ‘space geeks.’
I was quickly given a wireless mic, and I shared the story I’d told Jenn about growing up watching sci-fi movies and TV shows, and of seeing those life-changing Viking photos from Mars as a kid. I also spoke about my father buying a telescope in my early teens, and of seeing Saturn from our backyard for the first time. The glowing, ringed planet was ethereal; like a lovingly hand-drawn animation. It looked unreal. I also stressed that I have no formal science or engineering background, and was simply a longtime lover of the cosmos. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one.
Among those 20 people seated in the conference room, there were engineers and teachers sitting right alongside nonspecialists like myself. There were many stories shared, including a Turkish-born immigrant named Istem who incorporates her love of space into her current career as an art teacher (like my wife). There was also a teacher whose gateway into space exploration came through sci-fi movies. He then told a moving story of a late student who shared his own enthusiasm for space. Also present was an enthusiastic engineer named Jordan, who was currently working at Caltech on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. Kieron, a young man seated next to me, had recently found a job through a PS job fair, which came only through his own love of space.
We also had a passionate amateur astronaut in our midst. Mega-space fan Andy Sadhwani sold his house (!) for a chance to ride aboard the Virgin Galactic 7 suborbital spaceflight in 2024, rocketing up to 54 miles/87 km above the Earth. Andy enjoyed a few minutes of free-fall weightlessness, before gliding back for a runway landing aboard the spaceplane VSS Unity. Talk about living the dream…
Jenn outlines strategic goals for the Planetary Society going forward: inspire, mobilize, lead and thrive. The first three goals also serve to perpetuate maintain the fourth.
After we told our stories, Jenn took the mic and set strategies for the PS going forward, including reiterating the PS’s core values of space exploration, discovering extraterrestrial life, and protecting our planet through detection and observation of bodies which pose a threat. She also posited how the PS will move forward over the next five years, including key strategies to inspire, mobilize, lead and thrive. To those ends, she sought the group’s feedback for how and what members like ourselves could do on scales both local and global.
To that end, there were PS guest speakers, such as Danielle Gunn, our Chief Program Officer, whom I learned was responsible for the successful virtual Planetfest of 2021. Danielle was joined by Sarah Al-Ahmed, who is the current host for Planetary Radio, taking over from Matt Kaplan, who stepped down recently after 20 years on the job. Together, Sarah and Danielle sought our feedback, and outlined ideas for greater public outreach, and refining our presence on various social media platforms. PS Chief Advancement Officer Richard Chute also addressed the topic of achieving lasting growth.
After the meeting ended, Jenn had us meet across the street at Planetary Society Headquarters; the place I’d hoped to get a glimpse of only a day before, and now I was taking part in a full tour. Few times in my life has a single day felt so ridiculously fortuitous.
Returning to the lobby of the Planetary Society headquarters I’d briefly glimpsed the day before, I was now part of a group being given a fully guided tour by our CEO Jenn Vaughn–something I never expected that weekend. The model spacecraft near the ceiling lights is Voyager; the probe launched to the outer planets in 1977 that is currently leaving our solar system and is (as of this writing) nearly a light-day away from Earth, or 16,094,799,096 miles/25,902,068,356 kms.
The lobby also featured piece of the mylar material used in the creation of the LightSail spacecraft, a pioneering solar sail flight funded entirely by the Planetary Society. After a failed first attempt, LightSail 2 reached orbit in 2019, and successfully changed its orbit entirely through the pressure of sunlight. LightSail remained in orbit until 2022. The material was surprisingly delicate, yet resilient; almost like cloth.
Top, Bottom: Created by Don Moore, this Jupiter globe was used for an FX shot in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979). In the top photo on the right is a type-written letter to the Planetary Society from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (1921-1971). Using photos from the Voyager missions (1977-present), the globe was only painted on one side. The globe later cracked along its midsection during the SoCal Northridge earthquake in early 1994, and that crack remains as part of its story.
Former PS CEO and current Goodwill Ambassador Bill Nye’s office, which contained a large Mars mural made from a mosaic of rover images, models of other spacecraft, a telescope, and other significant pieces of space memorabilia. My kind of clutter!
In the top of the photo is a replica of the Pioneer spacecraft’s mission plaque with a map showing our place in the galaxy using local quasars as beacons, as well as a drawing of the life forms which sent the probe. Below is a plaque attached to the Voyager spacecraft offering instructions on how to play the Voyager’s onboard LP record, “The Sounds of Earth,” which offers images and sounds from Earth, with music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry.
On the left is former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech Pasadena, Bruce C. Murray (1931-2013). In the middle is famed astronomer, planetary scientist, writer, novelist and science communicator Carl Sagan (1934-1996). On the right is astronautics engineer and space spokesperson Louis D. Friedman, whom I’ve met at several Society events. The photo was taken at the PS’s original headquarters at a vintage cottage house.
Illuminated globes of the outer planets Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter (all with appropriate rings) hang suspended in the ceiling above the office cubicles. The globes were commissioned by Bill Nye.
A piece of Russian space art donated to the Planetary Society, made at a time of greater world stability, bears a famous quote from Russian rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935).
We were also treated to a speak peek at Sarah Al-Ahmed’s gorgeous new broadcast booth for Planetary Radio’s video podcast (there’s also an audio-only version, of course). Behind Sarah, in the right corner is a shelf containing action figures, artwork and other personal bits of Sarah’s swag. Lit in purple fluorescence, with a large mural of Jupiter as a backdrop, the new studio looks like it was designed for the Lucas Museum in L.A.
On a table outside of Sarah’s studio was a random table with a model of the USS Enterprise from the Bad Robot Star Trek reboot movies (2009-2016), a Star Trek ‘dilithium’ crystal (presumably a prop from the TV series), and a model of the Pan-Am space shuttle from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).
This is an actual meteorite from Mars which was donated by Labenne Meteorites in 2012. The meteorite’s origins were confirmed by lab testing of its trapped atmospheric gases, mineral composition, solidification age and oxygen isotopic ratios. And unlike the dilithium crystal in the previous photo, you are allowed to touch this pebble-sized piece of the planet Mars. Currently, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has launched its MMX (Martian Moons Exploration) spacecraft to the Martian moon of Phobos. Arriving at Phobos in August 2027, a vacuum-like device designed and built by the Planetary Society will collect samples for return to Earth in 2031.
A large plaster tabletop model of Mars’ Valles Marineris, produced for Carl Sagan’s COSMOS TV series (1980) by space artist Don Davis, and framed for hanging at Planetary Society Headquarters. In the series, host Carl Sagan took a ride through this ancient Martian canyon (far deeper than the Grand Canyon and roughly as long as the United States) in his ‘ship of the imagination.’ COSMOS (Sagan’s book and TV series) was another major inspiration for my love of space.
Roundtable Discussion Tour participants were also given a ‘swag bag,’ containing a Fisher Space Pen, as well as a Planetary Radio sticker and other little bits. Accidentally leaving my swag bag unattended in the hotel conference room (which was now being used for another event), Jenn and Robin quickly sprang into action and grabbed another one for me. I am such an idiot at times… most of the time.
After the tour, I headed back across the street to the hotel, where I was still absorbing the incredible good luck that somehow placed me at the very hotel on the very same day where a group I’ve been a member of for nearly 30 years was having a strategy meeting and discussion. When I woke up that morning, I certainly had no idea I’d be speaking publicly, let alone on one of my favorite subjects. In hindsight, it’s possible I’d received an email with a half-buried reminder about this event, but to be honest, I tend to skim through most emails these days rather than read them in great depth. Whatever happened, it worked out amazingly well somehow.
Perhaps it was in the stars, or, as Jenn told me, “It was serendipity.”
All 88 photos of the conference & tour are here: Planetary Society Roundtable Discussion Tour, Pasadena, California October 24th, 2026.
Membership
For those interested in joining The Planetary Society, there are tiered memberships for different levels of participation and affordability. From basic Explorer class ($50 a year) to New Millennium Committee membership ($500 a year). All members receive online newsletters, event schedules, donation requests, and quarterly issues of our magazine, The Planetary Report. There’s also the satisfaction of taking an active role in future space exploration projects, such as building the LightSail spacecraft and a sample-collection device for Japan’s MMX probe to Phobos. I recently bumped up my own membership to include my wife as well. Details here: Membership, Planetary.org.
