Spacewalking With Scott Wray, Artemis EVA Training Lead

Credits: NASA/Bill Brassard Scott Wray’s experience with spacewalks started when he was about 6 years old. A tent resembling a lunar lander provided the perfect imaginary spacecraft. “I would lie on my back with my feet propped up on a pillow as I imagined going through a launch countdown sequence,” he said. “Then I would exit the tent into a darkened bedroom and hop around just like the footage I had seen of Apollo astronauts.” Today, with more than 16 years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center under his belt, Wray is proud to have shaped spacewalk training across three eras of human spaceflight. Scott Wray smiles before a suited test run with Johnson’s Active Response Gravity Offload System. NASA/Josh Valcarcel The childhood fascination with spaceflight evolved into a passion for engineering, demonstrated through countless LEGO and airplane model builds and voracious readership of aircraft design books. His path to NASA was cemented by a week-long camp at Space Center Houston, which included several tours of Johnson’s signature facilities and a visit by former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz. “I was so inspired by the facilities and the incredible history of this place, I knew that I had to work here someday,” he said. Wray participated in NASA’s Contractor Co-op Program with United Space Alliance while studying aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and completed several tours with different organizations at Johnson. At the time, astronauts were training to conduct spacewalks, also known as EVAs, for both the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs. During one co-op experience with the shuttle’s In-Flight Maintenance Team (IFM), Wray observed the IFM and EVA teams collaborating with the STS-