Well, to be more precise, I was, kinda. It was the party answer to “what do you do at NASA?”. Before too much water goes under the bridge I wanted to write about my career history at NASA. As I’ve said in other pieces, NASA was the only place I worked in my professional career, and despite that I have never really shared much about it with friends and even family. Usually because when I used to start talk about microgravity fluid physics, you can see the eyes roll back in their heads. So the most my sailing and biking friends (care to) know is I was a Rocket Scientist because I had a card that said so¹!

I starting thinking about this in recent years while having long conversations with my father about his career(s). While I had the basic outline of his working life, I realized that I didn’t really have a great understanding of the details and the timeline. I think this is pretty common in families because during the time kids are at home they are either too young to understand or care about the details of their parents working life. And later, kids are in their own worlds focusing on establishing their own lives. It’s not until much later when looking back on your own life you realize what you didn’t know about theirs. This was the case with both my mother and father. Furthermore as parents age, they have difficulty remembering the details and context. So while I still have my faculties, I thought I’d write down a basic storyline of my career and sprinkle it with anecdotes as best as I can remember so my kids – who are now in that myopic phase of their lives – will have this to look back at (eventually). Some can fill books on their careers; me, well a few blog posts about covers it. This is not intended as a history or any exhaustive review of any part of NASA or the programs or projects I was involved in, just my limited view along the path I took through them².

My career at NASA spanned two general areas on either side of a career pivot, roughly in equal time blocks: Microgravity Fluid Physics and Web Development as well as a kind of “prolog” during college and graduate school because my schooling was funded by a NASA grant. This career pivot may seem a little random at first blush, but in retrospect it all makes sense as it was following a thread like I mentioned in my retirement piece. The reasons are wide ranging from evolving intellectual interests, moving to Annapolis after meeting Lisa, available opportunities and ultimately realizing I am a utility ball player. That said, all the the work I did at NASA was in the Human Spaceflight part of NASA, one of the main NASA thrusts along with Space Science, Earth Science, Technology and Aeronautics³.

In order that this not become a monster blog post, that I will have a hard time finishing, I am going to serialize it in five parts:

• Part 1: The Early Years – Case Western Reserve University
• Part 2: The STDCE Years – The Heydays of the NASA Microgravity Program
• Part 3: The Transition Years – The Move to NASA Headquarters
• Part 4: The Web Development Years – Being an IT Geek
• Part 5: Retirement!

I’ll endeavor to not let too much time elapse between the posts so the entire project doesn’t languish as I inevitably get distracted with other things. Additionally, I will probably end up continually revising these parts as I dig into my collection of NASA memorabilia in my future Swedish Death Cleaning years, once the boat and bike collections wane. I’m not a huge pack rat, but I do have a number of boxes of pictures, clippings, and artifacts that I will use to help illustrate these pieces. Fortunately so much of these activities have some kind of online presence that I can link to, either on the WAYBACK machine or in searchable NASA technical databases.

Footnotes:

1. When I first started at Lewis Research Center (Now Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field) in Cleveland, we could get cards at the NASA Exchange store. This is the government, so we had to pay for them personally. I thought, what the hell, I’m going to have some fun with this so I had these “Rocket Scientist” cards made with my real contact information. Of course I also had “real” cards made for work purposes. Terry McSweeney used to say every woman under the age of 30 at Bank Street Cafe in Cleveland had one. I certainly got my $35 out of those cards, IYKYK… ↩︎
2. I’m not intentionally being humble or self deprecating here, just realistic about my impact in the broader context of NASA. It’s a big organization with a LOT of REALLY smart people who do amazing things. As a Utility Ball Player, my impact is rather modest and unknown, but that’s not to say it wasn’t important in the context of my small cog in a very large wheel. ↩︎
3. Those were the thrusts as of the time I left in 2021. There have been monumental changes in the Agency and as of this writing, with about 25% of the employees leaving in 2025 and a big reorganization is taking place that reduces the Agency to three mission directorates: Human Space flight, Science, Research and Technology. ↩︎