Some of these found me wandering perplexed through the narrow corridors and showed me the way to the Pepys Library. When I finally pushed through the door, sweating profusely that summer afternoon, the briefing had just ended.

After getting off the coach, the group had walked towards the library in one of the buildings. On the way I had stopped to extract my Olympus camera and take a picture of a particularly impressive edifice.

In the few seconds I was looking through the viewfinder, my colleagues had vanished down one of the countless corridors. To complicate the situation there were 12,000 students crowding all sorts of narrow passageways in a flow of constant movement.

At Cambridge, about one-third of the students are women and about 10% from 90 countries outside the UK. I didn’t have the time to find out whether there were there any from PNG. What with all that getting lost.

In 1969, my primary school teacher told us about American astronaut Neil Armstrong who was the first man to walk on the moon. The teacher showed us pictures from Time magazine of Armstrong on the lunar surface.

Nearly two decades later, I heard about him again along with Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and by then Senator John Glenn who were on a steering committee of the US government’s Columbus 500 Commission.

This commission accepted spacecraft designs from around the world that could race beyond the Moon to Mars to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the Americas.

Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL), a global co- occupant of Cambridge Science Park, was the only UK-based company to put forward an entry.

CCL’s design looked like a huge manta ray and was described by planners as the most advanced technical design of all worldwide entries submitted. It was named Nina, after one of the ships in the Columbus fleet.

Nina was to be powered by solar energy alone on the trip to Mars.

A circular sail 250 meters in diameter, folded into a cylinder small enough to be stowed in a conventional rocket, was to be deployed after launch and power the spacecraft to Mars.

Chief designer of the spacecraft, Steve Temple, told me that one reason the team was successful was because CCL had such a wide variety of resources and technical expertise.

“They all contributed their knowledge to meet the many challenges the design posed,” he said.

The Science Park had been opened in 1975, the year PNG attained its independence.

I don’t know if that huge space sail made it to Mars but it was a pleasure for me to visit the place where the idea was hatched.

I had been lost and found and had some interesting chat. All had turned out well. What more could I ask for?