In 1987, I co-founded ISU alongside Todd Hawley and Bob Richards. Both men had also been my co-founders on SEDS and SpaceGen. Todd studied space policy at George Washington University and was fluent in Spanish, French and Russian. Bob was one of Carl Sagan’s teaching fellows at Cornell and also Canadian. Our hope was that Todd’s multilingual capabilities coupled with Bob’s north-of- the-border heritage lent a mild authenticity to our efforts to found an international university.

Truthfully, any authenticity, mild or otherwise, would have helped. We had set the bar pretty high. Our collective vision was to create an international, interdisciplinary university, stock it with the best minds in the space business, and create a revolutionary groundswell of off-world advocates. But before we could get around to the revolution, we first had to convince prospective funders and faculty that three guys barely out of college could actually start a university.

Our efforts got a big boost from visionary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, whom the three of us had met a few years prior. Clarke loved the idea of a space university and signed on to be our first Chancellor. With help from him, MIT President Paul E. Gray, Byron Lichtenberg, and a number of others, we got seed capital from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Lounsbery Foundation.

The International Space University Project Inc. set up shop in Kendal Square, Massachusetts, on the edge of the Charles River. Our office wasn’t much to look at. Just a few rooms above a bagel shop. The carpet was ragged, the walls buried beneath 1970’s wood paneling. To hide that paneling, we covered those walls almost entirely with space photos courtesy of NASA. Almost, but not quite. Our office manager, a woman named Goldie Eckl, had also put up a battered Murphy’s Law poster. Every day I would look up from my desk and get another dose of the bad news: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” It started to drive me crazy. Eventually, I walked over to a white board behind my desk and wrote: “If something can go wrong, fix it, to hell with Murphy!” Above that I wrote “Peter’s Law.”

In time Peter’s Law evolved into Peter’s Laws which— eventually there were 20 of them in total. All were little motivational aphorisms that reflected my thinking about the world and whatever wisdom I’d managed to pick up along the way. “When given a choice, take both.” “Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.” “Start at the top, then work your way up.”