>>This week on NewsNight, diversity in America's space program.

NASA's announced the Artemis II flight around the moon slated for next year will be its most inclusive mission ever.

While all 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon were white men, Artemis II will include the first woman and the first person of color to travel that far.

Tonight, the path ahead for the space program and the importance of representation in space exploration with Winston Scott, a retired shuttle astronaut and only the second African-American to walk in space.

NewsNight starts now.

[MUSIC] Hello, I'm Steve Mort, and welcome to a special episode of NewsNight.

This week we're talking about space exploration, past, present and future as NASA's prepares to launch a diverse crew of astronauts to the moon as part of its Artemis program.

We wanted to take a look at where we are now, how far America has come in its space program and what it all means for Central Florida.

To talk about it, I'm joined in the studio by former shuttle astronaut Winston Scott, who flew aboard two shuttle missions in the 1990s.

He's also a professor emeritus at FIT in Melbourne and author of the book Reflections from Earth Orbit, Winston Scott.

Thank you so much for being here.

>>Well, thank you so much for having me.

It's my pleasure.

>>Really appreciate your time.

>>Glad to do it.

>>Take me back, first of all, to the start of your career.

You grew up in Miami when schools were segregated.

You graduated from FSU.

Right.

In 1972.

>>That's correct.

>>And then you became a naval aviator in 74?

>>Yes.

>>How did you see at that point your career panning out?

>>It's interesting.

And we need to probably go back just a little bit before the FSU part.

I went to school at FSU to study music, and for the audience, many people might think that segregation in America was way, way, way, way a long time ago.

Its not all that far back.

Brown versus the Board of Education was passed in 1954.

Schools didnt actually integrate in South Florida until mid-sixties.

So 1965, my friends and I integrated what was predominantly white Coral Gables High School.

My band director at Coral Gables High School made a personal phone call to the dean of the College of Music at FSU.

So I enter FSU College of Music, College of Music to study music I discover during my undergraduate years what engineering is all about.

So I started taking math and science and engineering courses as an overload.

Now check this out.

In those days you could pay one tuition fee and take as many hours as you wanted.

Unlike today, where you pay by the hour.

Therefore, I could take 19, 20, 21 hours because I was taking calculus and physics-- >>Getting a lot more flexibility.

>>Music.

Absolutely.

Four years passed by.

I need to graduate.

I got to get out and get a job.

And I'm farther along in my music curriculum than I am in my engineering curriculum.

I'm wondering, how can I pursue an engineering degree?

Well, I sort of heard the military will send you to school.

No guidance.

And I'm just thinking of these things.

Vietnam War is going on.

They're protesting against the war.

People were ducking and dodging.

But I kind of felt the military was the right way for me to go.

So, long story short, took the exam, was accepted in the naval aviation training, became a naval aviator.

Navy sent me back to school, finished my degree in engineering.

So I have an academic degree in music, academic degree in engineering.

And then my Navy career, obviously led me to the space program some years later.

>>Did you envisage that happening when you embarked on your academic career?

>>I, I believe that it was back.

It was in the back of my mind, some place I can remember back in segregated Francis S. Tucker Elementary School, Mr. Franklin Clark who taught accelerated math and English.

Way back in a little segregated carver.

Talk to us about the space program and how it was going to blossom and how it in the future things would be open to everybody.

I believe he planted a seed somewhere in the back of my psyche that maybe was about to to be fertilized and unveiled.

It's funny how life works.

>>That seed eventually sort of germinated too.

>>Absolutely.

>>You did kind of a massive, pretty impressive naval resumé.

You know, at what point sort of when you were in the Navy, did you think, you know what, I want to join the astronaut corps.

Did you ever think that was possible really when you began your career?

>>I again, I think it was in the back of my mind that it was a possibility, but it's not something that I thought about up front or that I even talked about.

And I can remember, again, a turning point in my life after 20, 18 years in the Navy.

I had a good Navy career going on, but a friend of mine and I was sitting around the dinner table at my house after eating dinner.

We both were getting ready to go to Washington, D.C. You do the administrative leave.

No self-respecting pilot wants to go to Washington, D.C.

So I make an offhand remark.

You know, I always thought I might like to be an astronaut, but I don't know either.

And and they said to me, the way I heard it was, you really ought to apply.

That's the way I heard it.

And then I tossed and turned all night long, went to work the next day, talked to my commanding officer.

The way I heard it was, you really ought to apply.

So I made my - So again, I almost didn't apply at all.

I applied, and a year and a half later, lo and behold, I was one of the few that was selected by NASA.

>>And when you reported for duty at the Johnson Space Center in 1992, I believe.

>>92, class of 92.

>>What was that like?

>>Oh, it was a life change.

Well, first of all, being selected is a life changing event.

When you get the phone call from NASA saying you are hereby selected, don't say anything.

We're doing a press release and it changes your life.

Yeah, and you're right.

You pick up, you move.

You buy a house and you actually move to Houston, Texas, and report the Johnson Space Center.

When you report, you're kind of an official astronaut.

You become a real astronaut when you actually go to space.

That's right.

And again, it's just a life changing event in so many, many ways.

>>And you are one of a rarefied group of humans that have been into space.

You spent more than, what, 24 days up there, I think, as a mission specialist.

>>Thats right as a mission specialist.

>>Let's talk about your two missions STS-72 on Endeavor, STS-87 on Columbia.

First, I mean, what was it like when you finally got to your first launch day in 1996?

Explain that feeling.

>>You're lying in bed the night before launch.

You don't really sleep, you saga toss and turn and you're excited.

You want at let's get the show on the road because I've been training for years.

And when you wake up that morning, you eat your breakfast, weather briefing so on, go out to the launch pad, and then the clock begins the countdown.

You enter the shuttle.

Two and a half, 3 hours before actual liftoff.

And there are periods of being busy and periods of of of of quiet.

But the action starts at 7 seconds before liftoff.

That's when the engines ignite and shaking and vibrating.

And the fire is building up out front on the front windscreen.

And now you know you're going someplace.

And the ride from Earth to orbit is incredibly fast.

We go from signal on the pad to orbit 17,500 miles per hour and only eight and one half minutes.

So it is an eye watering ride.

And then, of course, the first time you actually look out of the shuttle and down at the earth beneath you is a perspective that I will never forget, because it's a perspective that you just don't get otherwise.

And it's just such a unique experience that I believe no matter how many times you do it, it probably never gets old.

>>You mentioned it before.

You - we hear a lot from people that have been to space that say it changed their sort of perspective.

Right.

Did you experience change in the way you view the world?

What - talk about that sort of perspective that you get from being in space.

>>The perspective is it is different and you see the world as being very small and fragile.

Unlike when we walk around on it day to day, we feel like the earth is pretty much indestructible.

I can't do anything to hurt the Earth.

I mean, we talk about pollution, but we can't really damage that.

But when you see it from up there and you can see out past the earth and see all the elements in the solar system, you realize how small and how finite the earth is.

And you do get a sense of of Earth being home and that you don't want anything to happen to your home.

You want to be able to get back there and you want it to be safe, clean place.

And if the earth looks very quiet and peaceful, unlike what you see on the 6:00 news, Earth is very, very quiet, very peaceful, and in no boundaries.

>>You wouldn't think it was war torn.

All these >>You would not.

>>Like human conflict.

>>That's right.

You would not not see, I think anything like that is going on when you see Earth from space.

And earth is very beautiful, is very bright and colorful and pretty unlike what you see in pictures.

I like to use an analogy.

When people watch a movie and they see folks trapped in the desert.

>>Yeah.

>>In the movie, all this is brown sand.

But when you look at the deserts from space, like the Sahara Desert, there's a lot of red.

There's a lot of orange.

There's some black, There's some.

The desert is very colorful.

So the earth itself is very, very beautiful.

Bright, colorful and peaceful looking.

And you really wish that we as individuals could put aside all these petty differences that we foster and begin to embrace each other as one family, as one human race on one earth.

That is our home.

>>Let's talk about what you did up there and talk us through some of your experiences while you were up there in space in the course of your duties.

>>Well, again, my first spaceflight, I performed my first spacewalk and then on the second spaceflight, two spacewalks.

The first one was very important because we were preparing to build the international space station.

You know, space station was going to be built in a location in orbit that was colder than we traditionally had gone.

So NASA modified the space suit to handle those cold temperatures.

And it was my job to test that, to evaluate the suit during a night pass when they could get me as cold as possible.

So here I am on a spacewalk.

I anchor my boots in the foot restraints to hold my body still.

They rotate me towards deep space as we approach a night pass and and then I'm going to activate these devices.

So I'm standing anchor on the shuttle.

I can look over my shoulder.

I'm in sunlight.

I look over my shoulder and see the Terminator coming.

The Terminator is that line between night and day.

>>Yeah.

>>So bright sunlight.

And then a few seconds later, I'm in darkness and instantly I can feel the chill.

I begin to give NASA a rating of as to how the suit is working.

So over the next 45 minutes, I was getting colder and colder and colder.

I'm using a rating scale to tell NASA how well the suit is operating, and the suit that they're using in orbit now is essentially the same suit I tested on my first spaceflight.

My second flight, I perform two spacewalks and the first one on that flight was very interesting because it was a contingency.

We had taken a satellite into orbit with us.

It was a 3,000 pound solar observation satellite, a Spartan 206 and we were supposed to deploy this satellite, activate it, leave it for 48 hours.

We'd fly away and do some other things.

During that 48 hour period, it was supposed to make measurements of the sun's corona.

The satellite malfunctioned in space.

A malfunction had developed this spin.

So you've got a 3,000 pound roughly the size of a small automobile, very slowly turning in space.

Well, because it was turning, we couldn't catch it with the robot arm.

Long story short, after several days of consultation, it was decided that my buddy and I would attempt a manual capture-- >>Go out and do it yourself.

>>Of this satellite.

And as you know, we did it took several days of discussion and so on and a three and a half hour spacewalk to finally manually catch that satellite and lock it into the payload bay so it could be brought home and repaired and sent up on a subsequent mission.

>>Let me talk a little bit about the the orbiter that took you up there.

You know, it's interesting when when Discovery was being decommissioned, I got a chance to to get into it and have a look around at inside the craft at the Kennedy Space Center.

What really struck me was sort of the bewildering array of controls.

>>Yes.

>>What do you think now when you see the new tech, say, for example, in the in the SpaceX craft looks pretty minimalist.

Looks like a Tesla, right?

So how do you how do you sort of compare those to those two?

>>Well, space shuttle technology, in a way, was certainly it's older than current technology.

The shuttles later and later in my career were upgraded so that we had the CRT television type displays and now we see the television type displays in the new Dragon capsule.

So, yes, literally the shuttle is actually yeah, there were thousands of gauges and circuit breakers and switches and things like that.

And you studied and understood not just where each switch was and what it did, but the circuitry underneath the switches, you know, you know, what are you actually doing when you throw a switch?

It's not just a manual movement.

Now, in a way, we've gotten away from that because so much so many of our systems now have become more and more automated and computerized and AI-driven.

And that's a good thing.

But it also is a challenge because I believe the more sophistication we have, the astronauts do need to understand the underlying function of the systems, not we don't want to become button pushers and not understand what we're doing when we're pushing buttons.

>>You flew on Columbia.

>>Yes.

>>Obviously, before the tragedy.

But you knew they were part of your cohort, right?

>>Yes.

>>Those astronauts on Columbus.

>>Yes, the Columbia astronauts were all my contemporaries.

And I knew them all except for Israeli Colonel Ramon.

I didn't know him, but the other astronauts were all my contemporaries.

And I flew on Columbia with one of the astronauts, got Kalpana Chawla, KC, as we call it her, from India.

KC was lost on Columbia, but we flew together on Columbia in 97.

So, yeah, they were my contemporaries knew them all well.

And the day we lost Columbia was really a sad sad day.

>>Must have been a hard day.

>>It was very sad day.

I can remember over my military days losing pilots, that's sad too.

But when things like that happen with the space program, it's it's difficult, but it's so unexpected.

I think it takes people by surprise.

>>In the eyes of the nation.

>>Yes, absolutely.

>>The space shuttle pulls into Port for the last time.

>>Let's talk about the end of shuttle and how that changed NASA and also the Space Coast, where you have where you have deep ties.

I mean, I covered the decommissioning of the shuttle fleet and there was a lot of sadness around.

I remember in central Florida that time.

Protests as well.

>>Yes.

>>As someone with deep ties here, I wonder how you saw that.

>>Well, I thought the retirement of the shuttle was premature and many of us did.

And I was on some panels and boards and we made recommendations to the administration.

That's the sad part about the shuttle was that we we are retiring a vehicle.

But that wasn't the worst part.

The sadness, while the saddest part was that we were retiring a vehicle before we had a replacement.

I guess you can as you know, once we retire the space shuttle, we begin to pay Russia to take us in space.

>>That was the only way to go.

>>The only way to go.

But it was so avoidable.

Not going to get too political.

But but that was is we're going to be was not a good move.

And I hope that we we the US never put ourselves in a position where we depend on other countries, especially those that could be adversarial.

We depend on them for our survival.

And as a program I think is a bad position in which to find ourselves.

So the real sadness was that we retired the shuttles.

I think, prematurely before we had a replacement vehicle.

But, you know, we are where we are now and we are again launching American astronauts from American soil.

And that's good.

>>Well, that brings me on to the next point, which was did you ever think space exploration was going to become the commercial business that it is today?

And we see these businesses sprouting up on the space Coast all the time.

Did that ever occur to you that that would be the way space would go?

>>Yes, I had no doubt about it.

I had no doubt about it.

One of my jobs after my active duty days was directing what was called the Florida Space Authority.

Some people may recognize the Space Florida now.

That's why it's called Space Florida.

Yeah, it used to be called the Florida Space Authority.

Governor Bush, Jeb Bush was in office at that time.

I directed it for three years.

And what we pushed for then was for the facilities, the government facilities to be opened up to.

And we encourage commercial space companies to come in and launch from the space Coast.

So what we see happening now, many of us I was only one of many people push for it back then because it doesn't surprise me at all that the private commercial companies are coming in and they're partnering with NASA and they're doing such a good job.

They're doing exactly what private commercial companies should do.

They're making access to space cost effective, more efficient.

And so on.

>>That's a good strategy, you think, for NASA to to sort of hand over those kind of low-Earth orbit, day to day operations, to commercial?

>>Yes, exactly.

Because NASA's we need a good, strong program to go off and do cutting edge, esoteric exploration type things.

But once they become routine, the companies that can make them cost effective, which are people who do business, the business men and women, the Elon Musk, the Jeff Bezos, those people know know how to do business.

And they're doing exactly what what we hope they would do.

>>Well, what do you see the role of NASA going forward now with Artemis especially as sort of commercial interests seem to, as you mentioned there, Elon Musk and SpaceX seem to harbor sort of similar ambitions for the moon and Mars.

>>Yeah, I, I see it.

Well, the role of NASA's still - NASA's still the leading agency for space exploration.

That's the government agency.

And NASA is still leading us back towards the moon and off to Mars.

But as you say, you know, we see SpaceX and some other said, hey, you know what, we're going to take our own parallel path.

And and NASA look out we may get there before you do.

So as we speak, I think we need a strong NASA leading the exploration part of it.

But we do have the commercial companies coming along want to do that same thing.

I think what's going to be a limiting factor is the end goal.

I admire what our commercial partners are doing.

Again, I push for it back in the day, but bottom line is they going to have to turn a profit.

They're going to have to make money.

That's what they are in business for and that's what we want them to do in the process.

Yeah, but turning a profit is not always consistent with exploration.

When you explore, you don't know what you're going to find.

You sink dollars into it.

It may be decades before there's a payoff.

There may never be a payoff.

So that's why you need a government agency.

The government can put money into things we explore at some point down the road it pays off.

But commercial companies, private companies, they can only put so much into exploration.

So that's where the dividing line, I think is going to come.

But unlike a lot of good, healthy competition and I think it's a good thing.

>>They can certainly use government grants and things to to to explore low-Earth orbit and some deep space that's a whole-- >>Exactly.

>>A whole different matter.

>>And even off to the moon, because we have been to the moon before, you know, this is it we haven't done in 50 years, but it's been done before.

So the companies that come along and want to go to the moon, they don't have to start from ground zero.

They'll start from scratch.

They can still build on on technology that has already been developed.

>>NASA's made a point to ensure diversity in its Artemis II crew, reflecting sort of, I guess, the the advances in America since that the sixties and seventies.

I mean, how important do you think diversity is in these endeavors to sort of establish particularly a permanent base on the lunar surface?

Is that important?

>>Absolutely.

I think diversity is important and diverse is important in everything we do in this country, because if our country is going to be strong, if we're going to maintain a leadership position in the world, we have to tap all of our pools of talent, pools of talent, all lie in diverse, diverse places.

You know, you donthave one race or one gender or one age group that has all the talent, you have to tap everybody.

And that's where diversity comes in.

So I'm not so much thinking about diversity just for the sake of how things look.

That's important too, because that's inspirational to young people.

But the pool of talent, again, is a diverse one, and we need to dip out of that entire pool so our country can be strong for everybody.

>>I mean, I guess as humans look for their place in the universe.

>>Yes.

>>As we move further and further away from Earth, you want a proper representation of humans.

>>Well, we do, absolutely.

But to get to that point again, we need to dip in that entire pool of talent.

And the talent is it comes from a diverse group of people, not just one segment of the population.

There hadn't been an African-American in the space until 1980s.

Now we have Victor Glover.

He's-- >>Victor Glover, yeah.

>>The first black astronaut to go to the moon.

You know, how do you see the significance of that?

And can that be an important moment?

>>Well, it is an important moment.

Again, I think it's symbolic in many ways.

One way is to say to young people of color coming up that, look, it is possible for you this this, this endeavor, this occupation is available to you if you choose to do it.

If you qualify for is not something that's that so far and that that out of reach.

I think that's the message we want to send and not just to African-Americans, but to all of our people across America, across the world.

You know, space should belong to everybody and everyone should have an opportunity to to reach space, either as a professional or as a tourist or whatever.

So.

So Victor's selection is is is symbolic in that way, in that he he's he represents a group that's underrepresented and he's inspirational to others.

>>Do you think he feels that or do you think as a former astronaut yourself, that he's focused on the mission?

>>Both.

>>It's a big one.

>>It's both, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I know Victor Glover.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's my son's age.

My son is like active duty naval aviator Victor Glover is actually a naval aviator.

We've Skyped.

We we have this its an informal network of African-American astronauts.

>>Okay.

>>We call ourselves the Afro-Nauts.

Yes, its not official.

A bunch of us.

We get together, we Zoom every once and a while.

I know Victor, and we came from the same mode.

So I know what he's thinking.

Yes, there is a certain amount of a I don't know if you call it pressure, but but he is under the spotlight because he is an African-American and because he's been assigned to the Artemis Mission.

But he's also focused on the mission.

You know, and coming from a naval aviation background, he's used to this compartmentalization.

You know, you begin you can focus on the job at the same time, we have all these other obligations that you have to answer.

>>Yeah, it's fascinating.

Crystal ball time to finish up.

Of course, the point of going to the moon, one of the points of going to the moon, of course, is that NASA's then wants to use it as a kind of a launching pad to go further.

>>Yes.

>>To go to Mars.

>>Yes.

I wonder who you think's going to end up at Mars first.

There's there is sort of, as people say now, a new space race, I guess, going on.

>>Well, there is a new space where actually there's probably a couple of space races going on we just talked about.

But the kind of informal race between NASA and the private companies goes Elon Musk is out there.

He's saying, hey, I'm like this going.

But we also have a space race going with China.

China has vowed to dominate not only space, but I think they want to dominate the world.

And so on.

So that's another space race that's going on.

So who reaches Mars first?

Well, I would say it's going to be the US, the good old US of A we still lead.

I think we're going to beat everybody there now, whether it will be NASA's or SpaceX remains to be seen.

But whoever gets there first, I hope that they will have room in their compartment where they could hang together a retired dude and take him up there to Mars, they can do some research on me.

>>But, you know, it's interesting you mention China there, because China, you know, is known to have very aggressive goals.

When you talk to U.S. space officials, they say they're extremely competent when it comes to space exploration.

And I wonder whether you think this throws up a fundamental question about how we explore space and who owns space.

And, you know, mining rights on the moon, for example.

There were big fundamental questions for mankind as we sort of move forward, correct?

>>Absolutely.

And those are questions that are going to have to be answered and questions that are going to have to be worked out.

Some of them can work can be worked out from a legal standpoint.

If we talk specifically about the U.S., it becomes much more difficult to work those out when it comes to an international level and then even more difficult when it comes to international cooperation with adversaries.

And unfortunately, China is still, you know, an adversary.

Russia is an ally, but China is still an adversary.

So those things are going to have to be have to be worked out and it's going to be very difficult to do so.

You would hope that we could leave.

I want to say petty differences and one one sense they're petty.

But they become that they become international so therefore, they're not petty.

But you would hope that as we branch out, away from Earth and out into this new horizon, this new frontier, we could leave that stuff behind.

But but we can't.

We're human beings and we're frail and we have our frailties and we have our biases.

And and we're greedy.

And I think we're going to take those.

Those are differences with us for a long time.

And who knows when we'll be able to put those differences aside.

>>Well, Winston Scott, former NASA astronaut.

Thank you so much for being here.

Really appreciate it.

>>Pleasure is mine, thank you very much.

>>And don't forget, you can find more NewsNight online.

We're at wucf.org/newsnight you can find much more NewsNight content there on our website.

Well, that is all the time we have for NewsNight this week.

Join us again next Friday at 8:30 here on WUCF.

Until then, from the whole NewsNight team, thanks for joining us and have a great week.