Our guest this week is Nicole Stott. Nicole grew up in Clearwater, Florida. She began her career in 1987 as a structural design engineer with Pratt & Whitney in West Palm Beach, Florida. In 1988, Stott joined NASA at the Kennedy Space Center as an Operations Engineer in the Orbiter Processing Facility.

In 2000, she was selected as a NASA Astronaut. In April 2006, Nicole was a crew member on the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) 9 mission, where she lived and worked with a six-person crew for 18 days on the Aquarius undersea research habitat. Nicole has been to space two times now, once in 2009 as a mission specialist on STS-128 Discovery, participating in the first spacewalk of that mission; she spent over 100 days as a flight engineer on the International Space Station (ISS), and returned on STS-129 Atlantis. Her second time to space was in 2011, where Nicole was a mission specialist on STS-133, the final flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Today, Nicole (a mother) is an artist who shares her passion for space through her work. She is a co-founder of the Space for Art Foundation, and is also an author of the book Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet―And Our Mission to Protect It, which comes out on October 12.

IG @astro_nicole @spaceforartfoundation

https://www.backtoearthbook.com https://www.spaceforartfoundation.org