Scott Edward Parazynski (born July 28, 1961, in Little Rock, Arkansas) is an American physician and a former NASA astronaut. A veteran of five Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks, Parazynski's latest mission was STS-120 in October 2007 – highlighted by a dramatic, unplanned EVA to repair a live solar array. In May 2016 he was inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame. He retired from NASA in March 2009 to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in the private sector, and he is currently the CEO of a technology start-up. He is the first person to have both flown in space and summited Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. He describes his life's experiences in his memoir The Sky Below.
Personal life
Parazynski is of Polish descent, as his great-great-grandparents migrated from Kraków to the US. He considers Palo Alto, California, and Evergreen, Colorado, to be his hometowns. He is married to Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. He has two children with his first wife, Gail. Scott enjoys mountaineering, rock climbing, flying and scuba diving. A commercial, multi-engine, seaplane and instrument-rated pilot, Parazynski has logged over 2500 flight hours in a variety of aircraft. As a mountaineer, his summits include Cerro Aconcagua (at above sea level, the tallest mountain in the world outside Asia) and all 59 of Colorado's peaks over in altitude. He first attempted to summit Mount Everest in May 2008, but was forced to turn back before the summit due to a severe back injury. Serving as team physician for the Discovery Channel a year later, at 4:00 am on May 20, 2009, he successfully summitted the mountain.
Other notable expeditions include a scientific dive into the summit caldera lake atop Licancabur Volcano ( on the Bolivian-Chilean border), one of the world's highest lakes, and setting the first bootprints adjacent Masaya Volcano's lava lake in Nicaragua with Sam Cossman in 2016. He also travelled aboard OceanGate's submersible Titan and visited the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic.
Education and early life
Parazynski attended junior high school in Dakar, Senegal, and Beirut, Lebanon. In March 1969 as an eight-year-old, he travelled to Florida to witness the launch of Apollo 9, an event he argued inspired him to pursue a career in science. He attended high school at the Community School, Tehran, Iran, and the American Community School, Athens, Greece, graduating in 1979. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Stanford University in 1983, continuing on to graduate with honors from Stanford Medical School in 1989. He served his medical internship at the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School (1990). He had completed 22 months of a residency program in emergency medicine in Denver, Colorado, when selected for the NASA Astronaut Corps.
Organizations
Parazynski is a Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association and The Explorers Club. Additionally, he is a member of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology, the Wilderness Medical Society, the American Alpine Club, the Association of Space Explorers, the Experimental Aircraft Association, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. He is president of the board of directors of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, and serves on the boards of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the University of Texas McDonald Observatory and OceanGate.
In 2014, Parazynski was appointed as a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and was designated ASU's first University Explorer. He subsequently founded Fluidity Technologies based on his intellectual property, a company aiming to manufacture and distribute novel control devices for mobility in 3-D space, for everything from drones and computer games to VR and surgical robotics.