The year is 2006.

I’m in the 7th grade at a middle school in Colorado Springs, CO. “Normal” kid, though seemingly just as excitable as always. I have a friend named Daniel who has a relative that is able to get him into the Space Symposium at the Broadmoor Hotel. At the time, I didn’t know there was a Space Symposium.

The next day, Daniel shows up at school with a canvas bag filled with all the swag they were apparently just handing out to any kid lucky enough to get in (it wasn’t actually for the kids, but you probably knew that). He shows all of us neat pens, flashlights, stickers, normal convention swag that I honestly didn’t store in my long term memory.

But then, out of the depths of this reusable bag (back in 2006 it was just a bag, reusable bags were the plastic ones given out at any grocery store), he pulls out something I had never seen in my life. It was a frisbee, but not of the standard frisbee shape that would have filled our sports and games bin in my parents’ garage. No. Appearing as if straight out of the future, this frisbee wasn’t a standard disc, it was a ring! As in most of the middle was empty!

Now the best I can do is pull this from a fond memory of long ago, but I’d swear to you that little green ring frisbee was glowing with a soft, other-worldly light. And to my 12-year-old mind and heart, having never seen anything like this, I made the only assumption I could. Somehow, this fancy frisbee is a piece of space technology, available in 2006 only to those privileged enough to be at the Space Symposium.

From that moment on, living in Colorado Springs most of my life, I would see advertisements for the Space Symposium every year as Winter turned to Spring. And whether I was actively thinking of the space frisbee or not, I knew the Space Symposium was I place I had to experience…

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Fast forward to present day. The year 2025. I’m in the middle (or maybe right before the middle?) of this huge inflection point in my career, actively seeking to make a move into the space industry. I spent months in phone calls, teams meetings, and email back-and-forths trying my hardest to figure out a way to get into the 40th Space Symposium.

I tracked down the member of Keysight’s Aerospace and Defense team that plans the company’s presence at conventions. Apparently this year Keysight would not be going to the symposium.

I had a coworker attempt to connect me with the volunteer coordinator from the Space Foundation. Dead end.

An old retired coworker and mentor from my early years at Keysight very thoughtfully reached out to some of his old contacts with a Space Symposium presence to see if they had any guest passes this year. No answer.

This was not going to be my year to see where the magic happens.

Now it’s the week of the symposium. A close friend of mine (let’s call him Sam for the purpose of this story) is in town to attend the symposium with his defense software company, so we have the joy of doing our every-other-week life/work/productivity meeting in person. I’m going to skip over some small details to hit you with the actual sequence of important events: we get breakfast tacos at Rudy’s, we talk about life, we talk about productivity books we’re reading, we talk about the baby my wife and I are having in July, he reveals to me that he and his wife are also expecting a baby only one month later, we laugh, we cry, we laugh again, THEN HE PULLS SOME STRINGS AND GETS ME TWO HOURS OF ALONE TIME TO WALK THE FLOOR OF THE SPACE SYMPOSIUM.

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It was awesome. It was fancy. It was inspiring. It was everything I dreamt of and more (I got to step foot in the next generation of space station and place my hands on the next Lunar Rover prototypes). As I walked from exhibit to exhibit, I was overwhelmed with a sense of belonging. In that moment, I knew this was the place I needed to be the next year and every year after. Not as a surprise gift from a close friend, but as a real part of the industry. I carried that feeling around with me through the rest of the exhibit halls.

As my two hours ran out, I made my way to the exit to meet up with Sam and thank him. I’m maybe 20 steps from the door when I pass the very last exhibit booth of the hall. Bear in mind that at this point I’m carrying a bag so full of convention swag it legitimately IS pouring out the top, I dropped a stress ball in the shape of the moon on the floor only moments ago. In my peripherals I catch sight of something white…and circular…something ring-shaped…

At this point you’re probably thinking…hoping?…that it was a ring frisbee. That 19 years later, during my big push to get into the space industry, after this crazy gift from a close friend that lands me in the place I’ve dreamed of seeing all this time, at the VERY end of my two hours, at the VERY last booth I walk past, I find the one object that seems to have inspired all of this. Almost as if to bring my whole experience full-circle, the perfect endcap. A young boy turned a grown man, a passion and love for space that never goes away, a space frisbee for a 12-year-old and a space frisbee for a 12-year-old-at-heart. That would certainly make for a nice story, right?

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You tell me.

It was the ring frisbee 🙂