It was an interesting time. It kept me at a 2 year college for "somewhat" more than 2 years. I got to see the rollout of the shuttle Endeavour, and later saw its first launch (with one of our payloads on board). I also saw another shuttle on the pad up close. Impressive. On that flight, we did the payload integration (just into a can, we didn't see in the cargo bay or anything) in what was apparently the building used to work on the radioisotope generators for one of the deep-space probes (Pioneer?)

We were working on a microsatellite design intended to piggyback on a Delta launch, but funding fell through and we were unlikely to be able to raise the $12 million launch fee with bake sales and T-shirts. A [link|http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/96/mpfsnsr.html|sun sensor] for the satellite was used to ground test Mars Pathfinder's antenna