Nicole Marie Passonno Stott is an American engineer and a retired NASAastronaut. She served as a Flight Engineer on ISS Expedition 20 and Expedition 21 and was a Mission Specialist on STS-128 and STS-133. After 27 years of working at NASA, the space agency announced her retirement effective June 1, 2015. She is married to Christopher Stott, a Manx-born American space entrepreneur.
In 1988, Stott joined NASA at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida as an Operations Engineer in the Orbiter Processing Facility. After six months, she was detailed to the Director of Shuttle Processing as part of a two-person team tasked with assessing the overall efficiency of Shuttle processing flows, and implementing tools for measuring the effectiveness of improvements. She was the NASA KSC Lead for a joint Ames/KSC software project to develop intelligent scheduling tools. The Ground Processing Scheduling System was developed as the technology demonstrator for this project. GPSS was a success at KSC, and also a commercial success that is part of the PeopleSoft suite of software products. During her time at KSC, Stott also held a variety of positions within NASA Shuttle Processing, including Vehicle Operations Engineer; NASA Convoy Commander; assistant to the Flow Director for Space Shuttle Endeavour; and Orbiter Project Engineer for Columbia. During her last two years at KSC, she was a member of the Space Station Hardware Integration Office and relocated to Huntington Beach, California where she served as the NASA Project Lead for the ISS truss elements under construction at the Boeing Space Station facility. In 1998, she joined the Johnson Space Center team in Houston, Texas as a member of the NASA Aircraft Operations Division, where she served as a Flight Simulation Engineer on the Shuttle Training Aircraft. Selected as a mission specialist by NASA in July 2000, Stott reported for astronaut candidate training in August 2000. Following the completion of two years of training and evaluation, she was assigned technical duties in the Astronaut Office Station Operations Branch, where she performed crew evaluations of station payloads. She also worked as a support astronaut and CAPCOM for the ISS Expedition 10 crew. In April 2006, she was a crew member on the mission where she lived and worked with a six-person crew for 18 days on the Aquariusundersea research habitat. Stott was previously assigned to Expedition 20 and Expedition 21. She was launched to the International Space Station with the crew of STS-128, participating in the first spacewalk of that mission, and returned on STS-129, thus becoming the last Expedition crew-member to return to Earth via the space shuttle. Stott completed her second spaceflight on STS-133, the third to last flight of the space shuttle.
First live tweet-up from space
On October 21, 2009, Stott and her Expedition 21 crewmate Jeff Williams participated in the first NASA Tweetup from the station with members of the public gathered at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. This involved the first liveTwitter connection for the astronauts. Previously, astronauts on board the Space Shuttle or ISS had sent the messages they desired to send as tweets down to Mission Control which then posted them via the Internet to Twitter.
