For a “small town Marysville guy” like Steve Schery, working for NASA was “just like you see in the movies.”
“You’d be in this big control room with 20 to 30 scientists and engineers all at monitors and the clock is just ticking,” he said of his work in NASA’s wind tunnel testing.
Contracting for NASA was “the peak of my work life,” Schery said, though it wasn’t always what he aspired to do.
He lived in Marysville from third grade through eighth grade while his father worked at Scotts. After moving to St. Louis, he continued to visit Marysville every summer throughout high school and even worked as a lifeguard at the city pool.
Growing up, Schery said he was most passionate about music and sports.
Getting into science was simply “to make a living.”
“In the sciences, you have to be good (to get a job) but you don’t have to be the best,” he said.
He attended Ohio State University – where he roomed with friends from Marysville – before receiving a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas and a PhD from the University of Colorado.
Schery was then “totally devoted” to “working up the ladder” in a teaching career.
He returned to Ohio for one year as an associate professor at Kenyon College before accepting a teaching position at Texas A&M University.
Though it was on the tenure track, Schery said he “wasn’t totally convinced” he wanted to stay in Texas so he accepted a “dream job” at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
He was surrounded by mountains, which allowed him to ski and fly gliders in his free time.
Schery didn’t have much free time, though. He said he regularly worked between 60 and 80 hours each week, as what began as “pure research” eventually evolved into teaching.
Even so, he said he enjoyed being around undergraduate students who came from diverse backgrounds and had a wide range of interests.
“That was really the heart of my career,” he said.
After becoming a professor emeritus, Schery said he moved to California to help his mother while she was in poor health.
A friend who he flew gliders with was working for NASA at the time, Schery said, and told him they “could make use of some of my skills, part-time.”
He began as an unpaid volunteer but gradually began accepting more responsibility in projects. Eventually, he was hired as a contract worker.
Though Schery is a physicist rather than an engineer, he said his interdisciplinary background allowed him to troubleshoot for a variety of NASA’s projects.
“If you had something specialized, a young engineer would eat my lunch,” he said.
But, his background in fundamental science allowed him to think about “dozens of ways to investigate” new problems.
“That’s where I could often make contributions,” he said.
Much of his time was spent doing wind tunnel testing for airplanes, space vehicles and parachutes – “anything that goes into space,” Schery said. He specifically worked on new designs for vehicles that would be attempting to reenter earth’s atmosphere.
He also worked on a biological experiment that took place at the International Space Station.
Schery evaluated how fruit flies respond to zero gravity conditions, as well as how cells could be grown in zero gravity. He said potential findings could lead to new ways to generate medicine.
While he called those two projects some of his favorites, he noted “some more geeky” projects, as well.
He received the NASA Ames Sustainability Award for his creation of a filtration system used at the Fluid Dynamic Lab’s water channel facility.
Similar to a wind tunnel, he said models can also be studied in a water channel that is “like a small swimming pool.”
He said “tracer dye” is added to the water, which allows scientists to follow the streams around the model and study how the fluid interacts with the object.
Previously, beginning a new study took six to eight hours because it required draining the tank and refilling it.
His filtration system allows the tank to simply recycle the water, saving time and nearly 30,000 gallons of water each year.
No matter what he was working on, Schery said he cherished the camaraderie between the scientists at NASA.
He said some of his favorite memories include attending talks from famous scientists and astronauts, including those searching for extraterrestrial life.
Unlike the competitive nature of academia, he said those at NASA were eager to help one another.
“We were all on a team,” he said.
After 13 years on the NASA team, he retired last month.
“For the first time in my life… I’m trying to take a break from research,” he said.
Schery said he is now enjoying scuba diving, skiing and sailing, as well as flying his motor glider when he’s able to get to the airport.
He said he is looking forward to traveling throughout the county to visit old friends, including – of course – his buddies from Marysville.