[1] Henson graduated from Prescott High School shortly after his father retired, before attending the University of Arizona and receiving a degree in electrical engineering.

[2][3] During most of his time at university, Henson worked at a geophysics company and mostly ran induced polarization surveys in the western US and Peru.

[4] Henson was known at the University of Arizona as one of the founders of the Druid Student Center, where a campus humor newspaper, The Frumious Bandersnatch[5][better source needed] was published in the late 1960s.

He worked on extremely low distortion quadrature oscillators and nonlinear function modules (multipliers, vector adders and root-mean-square).

He claims to have been fired from an unnamed company in 1972 for refusing to certify an electronic module for a nuclear power plant that failed to meet a required MTBF specification.

[7] Henson set up his own company, Analog Precision Inc., to produce specialized computer interface equipment and related industrial control devices.

[2] In 1974, Henson's occasional rock climbing partner, physicist Dr. Dan Jones,[10] introduced him to the space colonization work of Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill from Princeton University.

The experience eventually became an article, Star Laws, jointly written by Henson and Arel Lucas and published in Reason Magazine.

[14] Timothy Leary was influenced by Henson's work-and credited him in publications when he referred to Space Migration and Life Extension.

Henson's wife, Arel Lucas, was credited by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas for suggesting that the study of memes be called memetics.

[16] In 1985, Henson, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter signed up with Alcor for cryonic suspension after being convinced by Eric Drexler that nanotechnology provided a method to make it work.

In that same year, Henson moved to Silicon Valley to consult for a number of firms and debugged garbage collection software for the last stage of Project Xanadu.

Keith Henson was working for the company that bought the Xanadu license when Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin tried to destroy the news group alt.religion.scientology.

[31] The Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as Henson's supporters on the USENET newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, say that his trial was biased, unfair and a mockery of justice.

[33] [citation needed] Henson was held at the Yavapai Detention Center in Prescott, Arizona, awaiting extradition to Riverside County, California.

The power satellite work was reported in a series of articles starting with two posted on The Oil Drum[45][46] and three presented at IEEE SusTech conferences for Sustainable Technology.

Henson also was involved in producing videos about thermal power satellites[47] and beamed energy propulsion[48] the latter of which won an award in an international competition.

A shorter version was shown at the White House in the last days of the Obama administration by Lt. Col. Peter Garretson and Dr. Paul Jaffe as part of the D3 government-wide contest.