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It’s been 10 years since Bill
Squicciarini graduated from FHS, and since then, he has
worked very hard to become the highly respected NASA
engineer he is today. Even though he now has a successful
career, he didn’t always know what he wanted to do with his
life. He always had an interest in how and why things work.
Whether it was building Legos as a kid, or taking apart and
tinkering with various gizmos and gadgets as he got older,
or watching south Texas thunderstorms grow on the horizon,
he tried to learn all he could about the things that
interested him.
Bill moved from
Maryland
to Floresville when he was in 5th grade.
Floresville Elementary, Middle, and High Schools nurtured
this curiosity and expanded the skills and knowledge that
lead him to pursue a technical career. Many of Bill’s FHS
in-class and extracurricular experiences are applied to his
every day life. His involvements in Student Council, Tennis,
National Honor Society, Science Club, UIL, One Act Play,
Technology Students of America, and Business Professionals
of America taught him life skills about leadership,
challenges, teamwork, public speaking, responsibility,
public service, winning, and losing. Bill graduated FHS in
the top ten percent of his class and went on to earn a
Bachelor’s of Science degree from Texas A&M University at
College Station.
While at Texas A&M, Bill
worked summer and winter internships at the NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center in Maryland where his initiative, personality,
and work ethic secured him a full time mechanical
engineering job after graduating from college. His first
NASA project was assembling and testing a large and complex
component launched into space in 2007 which is now attached
to the International Space Station. His most recent project
was the very successful Hubble Space Telescope Servicing
Mission 4 which occurred in May 2009. Bill was the manager
of the Flight Support System which was one of the four large
gold-looking structures in the Space Shuttle payload bay.
His hardware was responsible for securing the Hubble
Telescope to the Space Shuttle and providing power and data
between them. During the mission, he worked on-console from
mission control in Houston to monitor his
hardware and trouble-shoot any problems that arose. Before
the mission launched, he was responsible for designing new
components and making sure all the systems worked correctly.
Part of his duties included training the seven astronaut
crew members on how everything worked both on the ground and
while scuba diving with them at the Neutral Buoyancy
Laboratory in Houston which simulates weightless spacewalks.
Another perk of his job was living for nearly a year in
Cocoa Beach, Florida, where going to work meant working
inside the Space Shuttle while on the launch pad at Kennedy
Space Center.
Bill’s successes are a result
of his hard work and learning from the challenges he has
faced. Floresville schools played a big role in shaping the
person he is and he hopes every student can realize that
living their dreams is possible with the right attitude and
making the most of the opportunities they encounter.
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