Learning physics
An inquisitive kid whose mom likened him to Curious George, the fictional monkey made famous in a series of children's books, Grunsfeld got an early taste of both terrestrial and space exploration from television and National Geographic magazine.
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Very impressionable, he read about the Mercury and Gemini astronauts and watched the nation's first space launches on a fuzzy black-and-white TV. Prone to drawing pictures of spaceships on his school papers, Grunsfeld also was enamored with stories about mountain climbers setting out to reach the highest summits of the Himalayas.
Perhaps the most pivotal point in his childhood came when Grunsfeld's third grade teacher asked his class to write biographies on famous Americans such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Babe Ruth. His assignment: Write about Fermi.
"I'd never heard of Fermi and my heart sank a little," Grunsfeld recalled.
But when he went home and started reading about the scientist, he was enrapt.
"He was a famous Italian-American physicist, and that got me interested in physics and the life of a physicist -- Enrico Fermi, in particular, because he was an explorer," said Grunsfeld, now a married father of two who enjoys mountaineering, flying, sailing, bicycling and music.
"He was a theorist, and also an experimentalist. He was involved in the Manhattan Project, and he loved to climb mountains, and loved to go out and explore with his family," he added. "So I found that his lifestyle was one that I wanted to emulate even, you know, back in the third grade."
The type of child who always wanted to know what makes things tick, Grunsfeld's favorite subject in grade school was science. "And when it came time to choose a (college) major, I chose physics because it seemed to me that through physics, you can figure out how everything works -- even the universe," he said.
A stellar scholar in high school, Grunsfeld received a bachelor degree in physics in 1980 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied astronomy and learned to build spacecraft hardware and tinker with telescopes.
A year later, Grunsfeld returned to his hometown and the University of Chicago, where Fermi had supervised the design and assembly of the world's first man-made nuclear reactor.
Coincidentally, a pioneering American astronomer named Edwin Powell Hubble earned undergraduate and doctorate degrees there in 1910 and 1917, respectively.
Then in 1929, Hubble proved the speed at which a galaxy moves away from Earth is proportional to its distance -- a discovery that marked the birth of the "Big Bang" theory and one of the greatest triumphs of 20th century astronomy.
With his own masters and doctorate degrees in hand, Grunsfeld moved on to California Institute of Technology in the late 1980s.
There, he studied binary pulsars as well as explosive x-ray and gamma ray sources with NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and at Palomar Mountain Observatory, which is where Hubble had done some of his groundbreaking work.
"So I've kind of been following in Edwin Hubble's footsteps," Grunsfeld said.
Next page: The NASA Experience
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