Who I Am

Hello. My name is Bill Boyd. I am the deputy chief of the propulsion and fluid systems branch of the engineering department at JSC. If you don't know what propulsion is, well, it is what is often referred to as "rocket science," although we are actually engineers rather than scientists. As engineers, we are responsible for taking what the scientists come up with and making it work in real-life applications like the Space Shuttle. Thus, the people in my branch helped design, build, and test many of the rocket engines, valves, and propellant tanks on the Space Shuttle Orbiter vehicles.

Although most of that work is over and the Orbiters are flying regularly, many of the engineers in my branch are helping to maintain and improve the Shuttle propulsion systems so that these vehicles can continue to fly well past the year 2000. We are also looking at new rocket engines and propulsion system ideas that will help us return to the Moon and even travel to Mars. Traveling to Mars will require a lot of energy, and controlling this energy to provide safe, useful propulsion presents us with many challenges.

My Career Journey

I graduated with a chemical engineering degree from the University of Houston in 1973. It was then that I was faced with another challenge - where would I "launch" my career. I interviewed with several chemical companies, got some good job offers, but something was missing. When I got a call from NASA, I felt it couldn't hurt to talk to them. When I got an offer to work in propulsion at a lower salary, I was faced with a tough decision. Again, a teacher, this time from college, helped. He commented to me that NASA in 1973 was dying -- Apollo was over and there was no future. Another challenge - to prove him wrong! I have been here now for over 23 years and am still learning. I helped design one of the Shuttle rocket engines, designed and tested advanced engines for future space vehicles, helped develop two flight experiments, and conducted studies of advanced spacecraft propulsion systems and on-orbit space vehicle "gas stations." For the last eight years, I have been managing engineers doing these same things. I am hopefully still contributing to our space program, but for sure still enjoying the challenges.

Influences/Preparation for Career Path

I think the challenge of this work is what I like most about it. As it turns out, most of the paths I took to get here were the result of challenges that were offered to me. I was born and grew up right here in Houston. But surprisingly, having NASA almost in my back yard did not make me automatically want to work here.

As a kid in the seventh and eighth grades, I built and launched model rockets, but I had no dreams of someday building real ones. I do remember the first Moon landing in 1969, the year I graduated from high school, and I remember thinking then how really neat it would be to work at NASA. But I figured that opportunity was for only a select few. In Houston in the 1960s, the oil industry was king. My father was a civil engineer, and I was fairly good at math and science in high school, so it seemed obvious that I would also go into engineering in college. But I initially had a difficult time deciding which specialty of engineering I would go into. As I went down the list of specialties with one of my high school teachers and I got to chemical engineering, he commented how that area might be too difficult. It was right there that I chose chemical engineering.

Personal Information

When I am not at work, the thing I most enjoy doing is being with my family. My wife Susan (also a native Houstonian!) and I have two children, Jennifer (we call her Jenn), age 11, and Chris, age 18. Chris is a "supreme" used-sports item collector - cards, balls, gloves, bats, shoes, you name it. He has turned this hobby into quite a business. Jenn was part of the SAREX team at her school in 1993 - got to talk to astronauts in orbit over a "ham" radio. They both have fairly unusual pets - each has a ferret; Jenn's is named Skeeter and Chris's is named Skooter. One of the things we really enjoy doing together is going for long weekends to San Antonio. We go two to three times a year.

My hobbies include woodworking and furniture building, old automobile restoration, and ship modeling. My current project is a 36-inch long model of the China tea clipper Thermopylae that sailed between England and China in the late 1800s. The "tea clippers" were amazing ships - 89 days from China to England around the tip of Africa! Here we are just 100 years later and we have on the designers' drawing boards concepts for modern "clippers" to take us back to the Moon and to Mars. I marvel at what the clipper ship builders did a century ago, and am convinced that we can accomplish equally marvelous feats in space. [Read about Bill Boyd's discussions with children about the 1986 Challenger explosion and rocket science in his additional thoughts].

Archived Chats

• August 1, 1997