Dr. Tracy Scott

Thank you so much for having me, Flora.

In some ways it is.

In many ways it's not because it was so different back in that era that I grew up in.

When my dad went into space, there was no communication at all.

We could hear them, but we could not talk with them.

So it was a completely different landscape in terms of communication.

So when our dads went into space, what they did for the families was they put this little communication box called the squawk box in our home.

that had a feed for mission control pretty much 24-7, although mission control would turn it off at night and they would turn it off if there was anything that they wanted to talk about technically.

But we could hear that in the background during the whole mission, which was just sort of like background noise.

So you heard it, but you're just like, oh, yeah, that's the squawk box.

And you sort of, as a kid, you didn't really pay attention to it because we had more fun things to do, like go outside and play with our friends.

Absolutely, Falara.

That's a great way to think about it.

So my dad was selected into the third group of astronauts in 1963.

So this was a really new occupation.

All of the astronauts in the first three groups had been either test pilots or fighter pilots in the military.

And this is what they grew up wanting to do, be a really great pilot, a test pilot.

There was no such thing as an astronaut, and they never thought about it.

So this is new, and they go into this occupation, and I moved to the area around the Johnson Space Center in Houston that was developed for the NASA Space Center at the time.

No one had lived in this area before, so there were these new housing developments.