KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – Veteran Winston E. Scott served over 26 years in the U.S. Navy reaching the rank of captain or O6, with seven of those years spent as a NASA astronaut.
A Florida native who grew up in Miami, Scott was interested in music and STEM – although the study of science and technology wasn’t called that at the time.
“We didn’t use the word STEM back then, but I always liked technology and science,” Scott said. “I was the kind of kid that played with batteries and light bulbs and motors and so on.”
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“Growing up, I liked space movies and airplane movies, but I never thought it was a reality,” Scott said. “I watched them on TV, I didn’t think I could do it.”
Scott was also a talented musician and opted to study music at Florida State University on the personal recommendation of his high school band director because, “That’s what I was good at.”
At FSU, Scott said his roommate was an engineering major.
Watch the video interview with Winston E. Scott below:
“One night, just looking over his shoulder, I saw what he was doing and that sort of awoken something inside of me. I figured I’m supposed to be doing that,” Scott said.
So Scott became a dual major, studying both music and engineering – saying the two are closely related.
“The way the brain operates, it decodes mathematical equations the same way it decodes written pieces of music,” Scott said. “Einstein played violin. I like to say even Mr. Spock played Vulcan harp. So there is a relationship, absolutely. One feeds the other.”
After graduating from FSU, Scott said he was looking for a way to continue his engineering education and figured the military would help with that journey.
He entered the Navy’s Officer Candidate School and his career really took off from there – literally.
“I asked myself, ‘If I go in, what will I do?’ and then I answered myself by saying, ‘Well, airplanes are cool, maybe I can be a pilot,’” Scott said, despite having no experience in a cockpit.
Scott’s first duty station was flying anti-submarine warfare helicopters off Naval destroyers before going to graduate school and completing his master’s degree in engineering. From there, he was assigned to a fighter squadron, flying the F-14 Tomcat, the jet made famous in the original Top Gun movie.
After that, Scott moved on to become an aerospace engineering officer and flew the A-7, the F/A-18 Hornet and the F-14 Tomcat again, totaling more than 8,000 hours of flight time in 25 different types of aircraft, including a hot air balloon.
That career in itself would be enough for most people, but Scott decided to apply to NASA to become an astronaut.
First he had to apply and be approved from a Navy board, and more than a year later, he was one of 19 Americans selected for the space shuttle program.
“I was confident that I could possibly be selected, but the numbers weren’t in my favor,” Scott said. “I was ultimately selected – the class of 1992.”
Scott’s Navy career launched him into space. He had the honor of being a mission specialist on STS-72 with Space Shuttle Endeavour and STS-87 with Shuttle Columbia.
Historically, NASA has selected 375 astronauts and 216 of those have served their country in the armed forces.
During the eight-day 1996 Endeavour flight, Scott and the five-person crew spent time testing tools and techniques that would go into building the International Space Station. Scott also performed his first space walk on the mission – over six hours long.
Scott said he also had the chance to test improvements to the spacesuit on his first shuttle mission. The space station was to be built in a super-cold space environment and NASA modified the suit to handle those conditions.
On his 16-day 1997 Columbia flight, Scott performed two space walks – one of which was a a seven-hour, 43-minute space manual retrieval of the SPARTAN satellite.
“The satellite had malfunctioned and developed a slow turn, a slow spin in space. Because it was spinning, we couldn’t catch it with a robot arm, so my buddy and I did a manual capture of that satellite,” Scott said. “Really interesting, life-changing event catching a 3,000 pound satellite in space.”
Scott credits his training in the Navy for preparing him for the next step as an aviator and getting into the space program, saying it was the smartest thing that he ever did.
Currently, Winston serves as the Director of Operational Excellence at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. One of his tasks is scheduling the astronauts in the Astronaut Encounter program, ensuring that visitors have the chance to meet an astronaut when they visit KSC.
I’d like to think at the end of the day – one of these days when I’m gone and people look back at me – perhaps my most important accomplishment will be to inspire somebody else, inspire a new generation,” Scott said. “I think that’s very important and more important that any particular personal accomplishment.”