THANKS FOR THE AWARD

摘要

I had originally planned not to go to the SAWE conference this year, but then I was urged to go by several people, so I knew that something was going to be happening at the Awards Banquet that involved me. However, I had no idea what it was, and I was stunned when Jim Valentine announced the creation of the "Richard Boynton Lifetime Achievement Award." That is certainly the greatest honor I have ever received and I am very grateful to the SAWE for giving me this. A lot has been made of my writing a total of 39 SAWE papers, but it was really only one paper per year. When you are as old as I am, it is not hard to have done a lot in your life. In part, I wrote papers for the SAWE because I felt that the major reason for going to the conference was to learn something new and I wanted to do my part, but also I discovered early on that the act of writing a paper caused me to focus on a problem in more depth that I might have otherwise. Although creating a paper involved a lot of work, it paid off many times over in the insight it gave me. Several of the new products I developed for Space Electronics were inspired by the act of writing an SAWE paper.