Winston Scott grew up in Miami and attended Florida State University to study music. While at FSU he started getting into engineering and at one point the word astronaut flashed briefly through his mind. So, after graduating in 1972, he entered Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School and two years later became a Naval Aviator and served as a production test pilot flying the F/A-18 Hornet at A-7 Corsair, in all accumulating more than 7,000 hours of flight time in 25 different aircraft including more than 200 shipboard landings.
Mr. Scott was then selected by NASA to become an astronaut and reported to the Johnson Space Center in 1992. He logged 24 days, 14 hours, and 34 minutes as a mission specialist during his two missions, STS-72 in 1996 on the Space Shuttle Endeavour, and STS-87 on the shuttle Columbia. He performed three spacewalks totaling more than 19 hours.
After retiring from his job as an astronaut, Mr. Scott served as director of the Florida Space Authority during Governor Jeb Bush’s administration in the early 2000s — what's now called Space Florida — and he served as Dean of the College of Aeronautics at Florida Institute of Technology, overseeing all aspects of the academic majors and the university collegiate flight training program. He formally retired in 2021 and is now Professor Emeritus at FIT.
These days he’s Director of Operational Excellence at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex and in that role was touring last week so we brough him by the studio to talk about being an astronaut, and what goes on at the KSC Visitor’s Complex.
Guest:
Winston Scott, Director of Operational Excellence at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex
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