“Traditional” transition of leadership from outgoing Challenger Chairman Bill Ready to newbie Scott Parazynski    At the annual meeting of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education (CCSSE) a couple of weeks ago in St. Louis, which included flight directors from most of our 50 learning centers around the world, I received the Chairman’s official [...]

Soyuz TMA-19/Expedition 24 Crew: Wheels, Fyodor & Shannon suited up   I was at work this afternoon when my very good friend and STS-120 EVA partner, Doug “Wheels” Wheelock (a.k.a. “Tike”), hightailed it off the planet from the Baikonur launch complex in Kazakhstan.  The replays on NASA TV show him grinning ear to ear, hamming for [...]

    As I was headed down to dinner on my final night in Cocoa Beach, a very familiar face boarded the elevator. “Al? Hi, my name’s Scott Parazynski, you may not remember me, but I think you’re taking over from me as the Duty Astro at KSC tomorrow!” Al Worden (http://www.alworden.com/), Apollo 15 Command [...]

I thankfully never leave home without my iPhone these days. Even though the camera resolution and aperture control isn’t the greatest in the world, I’m glad to have captured the following from my trip to the National Space Symposium and the Rockies…           Share and Enjoy:

Shuttle contrails and sunrise meet: what a beautiful canvas!   In the past 72 hours I’ve been misquoted in print and added as a signatory to a policy letter I never saw in draft form (and really didn’t agree with; my name has since been removed). Although I’m certainly not a government policy or budget [...]

Like a proud father, here’s a family photo album of the Space Rocks a.k.a. nuggets on-orbit, and as they were repackaged just before launch. The resin in which the lunar samples were embedded turned out to be more flammable than we’d like in a closed environment like the International Space Station. Thanks to a number [...]

    The crew of STS-129 took this nice photo of the P6 solar array repair the STS-120 Team did way back in November 2007. Exciting to see it hasn’t changed one bit! Share and Enjoy:

  I recently had the chance to speak with Stéphane Sebile, who I’d met a few years ago in Paris, and now has a very nice space blog at http://spacemen1969.blogspot.com/ He asked me to dig way back into the memory banks and recollect my thoughts on my first trip into space. After dusting off the [...]

WHAT: Retired NASA Astronaut Scott E. Parazynski, the only human to both travel into space and climb Mt. Everest, will speak at the AIAA Space 2009 Conference & Exhibition’s “Education Alley” Education Alley, AIAA’s innovative aerospace education program, will highlight the world of aerospace engineering and science to over two thousand Pasadena area students in [...]

Several weeks ago, my friend Wayne Hale asked his Tweet community: “Space Policy forum is debating the definition of exploration. Is Scott Parazynski climbing Mt Everest “exploration”?” An excellent, thought-provoking question that I hadn’t had time to properly address while on the mountain. Here is my take on the matter, having recently taken journeys to both [...]