Carol Scott helped NASA assess what went wrong – and recovered from – two tragic accidents during the Shuttle program.
But today, he is the manager of the Launch Vehicle Office of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program – and that means he and his team are very important in determining that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules are ready for this mission and that the unavoidable risk is reduced.
It was not an easy show.
“I can’t sleep well, because I’m already quite worried,” he joked during an interview with CNN Business on Tuesday. “But if I don’t have butterflies, that’s not true.”
CrewX Capsules from SpaceX are unique: The company handles design and development, although NASA still provides critical safety surveillance. Scott’s team numbered in the thousands when he worked on the Space Shuttle program. But his team now numbered in the hundreds.
Even so, Scott has never been more confident, he said.
That [SpaceX] The system is clearly much safer than Shuttle – for many reasons. “
For one thing, the shuttle requires astronauts to bind to a giant white spaceship, which is vertically attached to a rocket amplifier on the launch pad. But for this mission, the astronauts will sit tightly in the Crew Dragon capsule, which sits on a large rocket.
With the shuttle, “a piece of foam came off and hit the orbiter,” causing the great destruction of the Columbia orbiter in 2003. “But if you have a capsule on it – hey, the only thing that will hit is raindrops.”
