"After I graduated from the math department of Tokyo Institute of Technology, I was teaching math to high school (equivalent to A-level) students in 1985. I started to work for Fujitsu in 1987 and joined a newly launched space department. I was initially involved in Japan’s 'Space Plane' project with NAL (National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan, now merged into JAXA), mainly for its descent phase guidance which was based on the US Space Shuttle algorithm.
Later, my department showed great interest in the microsatellites market and decided to send engineers to learn microsatellite technologies, and SSTL was chosen. Around that time, perhaps in 1990/91, Prof. Sweeting also visited Tokyo, and our team entertained him by showing him a 'Tokyo Night' as best as we could.
I was one of the engineers chosen to go to the UK and I joined SSTL in March 1992 as a technology transfer engineer from Fujitsu. SSTL was in UniS BA building and one spacious room was used as a clean room where I saw S80/T and KITSAT-1. Quite a few Korean technology transfer engineers were working on their spacecraft.
When Fujitsu asked me to come back to Japan for another project in March 1994, I decided to stay here and work for SSTL. I re-entered UK in August 1994 when my official employment as a research fellow of UniS (later transferred to SSTL) had started. Although I was partly working on HealthSat-2 and PoSAT-1 in 1993, my first challenging task as a SSTL engineer was to commission CERISE microsatellite with Neville and Dr. Hodgard from UniS as ADCS consultant. Since then, I was involved in most of SSTL satellite projects as an ADCS engineer. Neville and I were working together even to maintain/recover/improve UoSAT-2 and UoSAT-5 attitude.
I also travelled to US (2007), Germany (2008), Spain (2009), and Russia (2012) with the satellite initial commissioning team and had a very good time with our team as well as customers.
The most memorable moment at SSTL for me is perhaps when I met the late Queen Elizabeth while she was visiting SSTL to see UoSAT-12 on 11th December 1998. I will never forget the entire day in my life."
Some people join SSTL from just around the corner.. and then we have someone like Yoshi who travelled from the other side of the world to be with us. Truly inspiring. Thank you, Yoshi.