When space shuttle Atlantis touched down safely early Thursday morning, among those who had a role in its mission was the son of a former Iolan.
Scott Wray, son of Mike Wray and grandson of Dorothy Wray, is an aerospace engineer with U.S. Aerospace, a contractor for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He was involved in the extra-vehicular activity (spacewalk) section for the Atlantis mission.
Scott and three other EVA engineers were at the Kennedy Space Center to seal the cargo bays for the final shuttle flight and then were there on July 8 for its liftoff.
“They hightailed it back to Mission Control in Houston as soon as Atlantis was en route to the ISS (International Space Station),” Mike Wray recounted, to help with ground control portions of the flight.
Scott’s crowning achievement, his father said, was to be on duty at Mission Control on July 12 for the final spacewalk.
“We trained for it to be six hours and 30 minutes, and it was completed in 6:31,” Scott Wray said in an email to the Register.
Scott noted he took the lead in the last hour and a half of a cover installation, in large measure because it was a project he helped design and trained the crew to accomplish.
Training included Scott and other engineers dressing in the same flight suits the Atlantis crew wore and going through space walk procedures in a huge water-filled tank that replicates conditions in space.
A highlight at Mission Control was when the crew in orbit called down Scott’s name in thanks for what he had done.
“Not too many people can say their name was uttered from space,” he mused.
MIKE WRAY, a 1968 graduate of Iola High, works in health care in Austin, Texas. He and wife Barbara have two other children, Charlie, who graduated from medical school in Southern California in May and is doing his residency at Loma Linda Medical Center, west of Los Angeles, and Kelly, who graduated in June from high school and will attend Texas A&M this fall to major in advertising and marketing.
Scott Wray, after working with sled dogs in Alaska for a time, earned a degree in aerospace engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University at its Prescott, Ariz., campus.
Dorothy Wray, who spent most of her life on a farm north of Gas, now lives in Austin.
