Dr. Tracy Scott

But those of us that were younger, I don't think we really took it in.

And I think our moms protected us.

Yeah.

So much is different.

NASA was only five years old when my dad was selected into the astronaut program.

It's wild.

What I tell my students, it was like a startup.

It was much less bureaucratic.

It was much more flexible.

Everybody knew each other.

The astronauts had input into how the spacecraft was being designed.

They all talked together when they were in the office.

It was informal communication.

way different than it is now.

There weren't nearly as many of the rules and regulations.

They weren't as strictly enforced.

So I think there was this level of informality and camaraderie that bound people together more closely in that small group culture.

What I think that shows is this, the bigger kind of perspective shift that happened a lot, that has happened a lot with many of the astronauts.

When you go into space and you go further than low Earth orbit where you can actually see the Earth in the vastness of deep space, it shifted a lot of the men's perspectives at the beginning in a way that they didn't anticipate.

And one of the best accounts of this came from Rusty Schweikart.