Retiring from paid employment at the RAE in May 1988 proved to be the prelude to two years of unpaid attendance part-time, clearing up the loose ends. During the last twenty of my forty years at the RAE I was able to adopt the most efficient procedure of filing away all working papers and reports received, by subject, in filing cabinets that remained in place and just increased in numbers. No time was wasted in going through them on throwing-away sprees. It was ‘onward undaunted’ continuously, with everything undisturbed, in the same office. All that had to end in 1988. In a long and traumatic series of evening massacres at home, I ploughed through the 25,000 neatly-filed letters in my ‘general correspondence’ and threw away about 98%. My wife with great forbearance allowed the smallest bedroom in the house to be lined with shelves and converted into an archive room, to store the papers needed for this book, and some of my books and reports on space topics. A second round of massacres is now in prospect among those archives …

At the RAE, meanwhile, I was obliged to vacate my office in Q134 Building in May 1988, and took a suitcase-full of selected papers each day across to a new office in R14 Building, reducing the bulk to a mere six filing cabinets. The Table of satellites was taken over by Doreen Walker and Alan Winterbottom: Geoffrey Perry, uniquely knowledgeable in current space activities, continued to supply the basic data under contract.