NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Bill Wilshire already has celebrated his retirement by buying a new spinnaker for his Catalina 34 sailboat. Beginning on Tuesday, he'll have time to sail it.

Wilshire, deputy director of the Aeronautics Research Directorate at NASA Langley, finishes 31 years with the agency. He spent 17 of those years on research, worked 10 years in noise reduction and earned management experience. He also met wife Kelli, who heads the FAA office on center. They have an 11-year-old, Paul. "I wanted him to have the kind of summer I used to have," Wilshire says of spending some quality time with his rising-middle school student.

In a way, Wilshire is also a rising middle schooler. He wants to teach math at that level. "Friends have told me that I'm crazy," he said. "But I think middle school might be the right level to help people in math." He has tutored students in Poquoson in math for 15 years.

His final days at Langley have been spent in reducing 40 boxes of memorabilia to 10 – "my wife says we don’t have room for 40 boxes," he said – and deciding that 16 or 17 research notebooks are not going to be thrown away. And in remembering.

"I'm a very lucky guy," Wilshire said of his NASA career. "I'm going to miss it. Most of all, I'm going to miss the people."



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Langley Research Center
Managing Editor: Jim Hodges
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