Real Space Cadet: An Engineer’s Life At NASA
Joyce Seriale-Grush wanted to work at NASA since she was 13 years old. On July 21, 1969, Seriale-Grush walked outside and looked up at the moon, thinking about how at that very moment, for the first time in history, human beings were on two different planets. Combined with the influence of epic space operas such as “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” Seriale-Grush was hell bent on working for the space program.
“I’ll do anything, I’ll clean the floors,” she said. She never had to. When she graduated from college in 1980, she immediately began working on the Space Shuttle’s Orbital Maneuvering System, referred to as the OMS. This system is responsible for getting the spacecraft into orbit, adjusting its orbit, and for de-orbit.
In January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated above the Atlantic ocean shortly after launch, killing its crew of seven. Seriale-Grush got involved with the investigation, and worked with the Subsystems Managers who were in charge of analyzing each of the subsystems to find out what caused the disaster. She moved on to become the Auxiliary Power Unit Subsystem Manager.
During her first day at NASA, she met her future husband Gene Grush, who had begun working in her office six months before her arrival. When Grush was offered a job as the head of resident office at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, for nine months in 1991, Seriale-Grush came along and she ended up working on all of the Space Shuttle’s hydraulic and main propulsion systems. When she came back to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, she was offered a job as a Deputy Chief engineer. Eventually she was promoted to Chief Engineer at Johnson Space Center.
When the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, Seriale-Grush began working on developmental projects, such as the Mars Rover and a Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle, or MMSEV. At this point, political tensions began to be too much for her to handle, as NASA was repeatedly being defunded and having their plans changed by congress. “Before Obama got in, his people came in and talked to the head of our orbiter program and said ‘So tell me again why I should care about manned space.’ and we knew we were in trouble.” When the shuttle program was cancelled, 20–30 thousand engineers were laid off.
NASA is now working on the SLS, or Space Launch System, and the Orion manned space capsule, which was originally used for the Constellation Program, a deep space launch system that had been cancelled due to being incredibly over budget. Orion is now being used on an asteroid retrieval mission, which Seriale-Grush seemed to be incredulous about.
Seriale-Grush states, “Nobody is directing the boat. Now they’re always talking about going to Mars, but the only way we are going to get to Mars is to put everything we’ve got into getting to Mars, you can’t have all these little pet projects on the side. You’re focusing all of your efforts into Mars, just like with Apollo.” Her and her husband both say that we must go back to the moon, and use it as a base to learn how to survive outside of Earth’s protective radiation belts. Cosmic radiation proves to be a big obstacle, as it causes serious damage to the human body and cannot be stopped by any sort of yet-discovered shielding.
All in all, Seriale-Grush expressed her adoration for her job. “It was one of those jobs where no matter how tiring or stressful it was, you always wanted to be there.” She mentions that she personally never had to fight with sexism, and that NASA was very good at treating all of its employees with respect. She asked Grush if he had ever witnessed sexism, to which he replied, “I’ve never seen it in the workplace, from what I can see it’s more that, for whatever reason, women aren’t going into the engineering profession at the same rate as men. I don’t know why, I don’t understand it. It’s probably a cultural thing, but I would have expected better numbers by now.”
Seriale-Grush then stated that she was a B+ student in math, but that she brought other things to the job. She looked at things from a different perspective, and since she wasn’t particularly good at visualizing problems, she had to learn how to interpret things in her own way. “I think it’s more of a desire to go into the field. I just wanna tell the young ladies, and men, that just because you’re a B plus in math — you gotta still know your math, of course, but you’ve got a book there, go look it up. You’ve got a computer now. The most important thing is to work hard.” Grush added, “You can go to college and learn the equations, but applying them to the real world is different. I was good at solving puzzles. That capability is not necessarily useful in school, but it’s very useful in the workplace.”
Their disillusion with the direction NASA was taking eventually overpowered them. Joyce Seriale-Grush and Gene Grush retired from being chief engineers at NASA in 2012, after over 30 years of experience with space flight. NASA didn’t have a mission, and the current administration does not see fit to put their support behind space exploration.
“Would I ever go back? In a heartbeat! If they got a mission, Gene and I would be begging to clean the floors. The problem is that a lot of people think of us as old school. I believe that if you have a failure you have to stop and figure out your failure before you fly again so that you don’t kill anyone. I have a reputation for being very stringent about staying within the box because that’s how you keep people from getting killed. I always say we are risk aware, but not risk averse, because if you are risk averse you don’t get off the ground. It’s the politics that’s killing us, not the people in NASA.”
